


The Backup

by juliacarmen



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: B-4 POV, F/M, Hallucinations, Haunting, M/M, Nightmares, OC POV, Slow Build, evil Data
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 13:33:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 47,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16265246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliacarmen/pseuds/juliacarmen
Summary: B-4 is haunted by his dead brother.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic does not take into account any storylines written after Nemesis.
> 
> This fic is unbetaed. Comments and constructive criticism are welcome.

 

The prairie stretched as far as the eye could see, slowly but steadily carpeting the badlands, despite the frosts and storms that ravaged it. The air simmered in the heat, and the tallgrass buzzed. A herd of a few hundred buffalo grazed beside a creek in which a young man was wading, shirt in hand, cold water purling over his knees. He stared out across the prairie and wondered, not for the first time, what would happen when the tallgrass reached the farmlands to the north or the Rust Belt to the south. The farmers who came to trade in town were already speculating darkly about plagues of locusts. His view was suddenly obscured by a transparent pink box that seemed to hover in the air.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought.

A low, mournful klaxon rolled across the prairie. The buffalo snorted and twitched their ears. But the young man had been waiting for it. He pulled on his shirt, splashed out of the creek, and stepped through a cloud of midges to where an ancient hoverbike lay rusting in the grass. He started it up, eliciting another collective snort from the herd.

The bike rose with a metallic groan of effort and began drifting, only a little faster than walking pace. He crossed his arms over the handlebars, and dropped his feet off the footplates, so the grass tips tickled his toes.

Eventually the grassland gave way to dust, and he opened the throttle, blowing up a cloudy wake as he sped toward the factory.

*****

 _Left, right, right, fucking Checkpoint Three._ Kayla bounced on her heels as she waited to go through, her facemask and all-weather suit slung over a shoulder. She knew B-4 was waiting for her.

They had met some months back. He had been exploring the town, trying to be inconspicuous in a way that'd made her laugh out loud.

The townsfolk knew what he was. They had seen one of his kind before. So they gave him the side-eye and a wide berth. All except for Kayla, who sidled up to him, looped an arm around his, and asked if she could see his watch. She had never seen a real pre-Eugenics watch before. It even ticked! It had taken her two weeks to convince him to let her take it apart and put it back together again.

Now every afternoon she would rush out of the factory at the four o’clock horn, and find him waiting for her on his hoverbike, sprawled lazily over it like those things didn’t have a tendency to explode without warning.

She took his arm and hopped up behind him. The machine whined dangerously at the extra weight. She wrapped her arms around him, and he turned the bike northwards.

As they rode across the badlands, he steadily urged the bike to greater and greater speeds, until it was vibrating hard enough to make her teeth rattle. It made her legs turn to jelly, and she tightened her grip around him, making sure he could feel her breasts against his back.

The ride was far too short for her liking. He had said the day before he wanted to show her something, and now she could see it was the downed bird-of-prey. She was a little disappointed. She already knew about that old wreck. Everyone did. It had been there more than fifty years.

He stopped the bike and jumped off. Then he held out his arms to her, and she slid into them, wrapping her legs around him and pressing her hips against his. He smiled and carried her to the bird-of-prey. She could feel him growing hard against her. Behind them, the hoverbike lowered itself to the ground and shut off with a hiss.

He proppped her against the wind-pocked hull of the bird-of-prey, letting her grind against him as he kissed her, and she thumbed open his shirt. Maybe the trip wasn’t a waste, after all.

“Bee!” She gasped, both desperate and demanding. He obligingly reached a hand between them, and after a bit of fumbling, she finally felt his cock breech her. She groaned as his girth stretched her and he slowly let her drop against his hips.

The air filled with her moans and the slap of their hips as he fucked her hard and fast. Her skirt rode up to her waist. The ancient hull shredded her panties and rasped against her buttocks. But she didn’t care. He was letting her have it the way she wanted, with none of that frustrating teasing he had developed a taste for. She came within minutes.

He kissed her again, and lowered her gently to the ground. There was something he wanted to show her.

First, he led her to a heap of metal debris twice her height. It likely came from a Rust Belt junkyard, and she wondered how he had got it here. It made her hands itch. She wanted to dig into it like a groundhog. But he led her around the pile, and she found he had built a shack out of rusting sheets of iron, knex girders and bright blue tarps, with an old factory chimney stack at one end. They stepped inside, and she saw it was a forge.

“You’re going to fix her up, aren’t you?” She asked in wonder. “How much of her is missing?”

He shrugged off his shirt, and waved a hand at an old picnic table set against one wall. It was covered in documents: wood paper, linen paper, plastic e-paper, and a few battered PADDs. She found several detailed drawings of holes in the bird’s hull, along with schematics for the parts that had been crowbarred off.

The bird had landed mostly in one piece. The consensus among the townsfolk was that a malfunction had forced her to land during a scouting mission. Everyone knew the crew had died: it was the likeliest outcome. No one cared how, or what had happened to the bodies.

She sorted through the mess with a keen eye while he stoked the forge. “This doesn’t really seem like a lot, and all from the outside. What about the inside?”

He gave her an absentminded shrug as he cranked a rickety forge fan.

“What, you haven’t checked?” She asked incredulously. She dropped the papers and ran back outside. Finding the hatch to the loading ramp, she stroked a hand over it wonderingly. Then she walked carefully around the bird.

“It’s still sealed!” She exclaimed, “how can it still be sealed?!” She hurried back to the forge. “Can I help you fix her? I want to help!” She was bouncing on her feet with excitement. He smiled.

*****

The sun had just touched the horizon as B-4 lifted Kayla off the bike and set her gently in front of her building. Usually they would part with a quick kiss, and he would speed off back to the Land Grant. But today, on a whim, she asked him to come in.

He followed her through the maze of halls and stairs to her hab. “The elevators tend to get stuck with you inside.” She explained, “and there’s no one to complain to that ain’t taking backhanders.” She looked back at him. “Yeah, I know,” she sighed, “you _do not understand_.”

It was a phrase he used a lot, and she had learned to recognize the look that preceded the statement. She didn’t really mind. He listened, and she knew plenty of guys who could understand her but didn’t listen.

“Here we are, home sweet home.” She kicked open her cot and dropped her facemask on it, watching his eyes methodically sweep the room as she replaced her all-weather jacket with a faded silk robe she had inherited from her grandmother.

The robe made her feel more at home than the room itself did. It was just a hab: the standard five by five metres of space with all the standard fold-away amenities, and a very basic replicator recessed into the wall.

Some people added kitsch to their habs to make them look homey. She didn’t care for dust collectors, but Mr Havisher had recently given her an ancient player piano in exchange for refurbishing a black-market leather sewing machine. The piano’s plastic casing had once been transparent, but was now cloudy with age.

B-4 reached up and lay a hand flat on the ceiling.

“What?” She said defensively. “People used to pay money for digs like this in the bad old days. Tea, hot, with milk,” she added to the replicator. She knew what it produced had only a passing resemblance to either substance.

B-4 wrinkled his nose. So did she, after a sip.

“Ugh, you’ve spoiled me, giving me real milk. Now this replicated stuff is too awful.”

B-4 held out his hand with a conjuror’s flourish. On his palm was a little bundle of cloth sewn together with string.

She picked it up and tried to peer into it, then she sniffed it. “Oh! Is this real tea?!” She inhaled again. “Water, hot!” she barked at the replicator, dumping her first cup. He stepped over to the player piano and pressed a few keys. It didn’t make a sound.

“It’s broken,” Kayla said, lowering the tea bag into the water. “Been meaning to fix it. How long does it take for tea to… cook?”

She gaped as B-4 tipped the piano forward, covering most of the hab's floorspace and exposing a mess of circuitry. There was no back panel. Mr Havisher said it’d been made of wood pulp and had disintegrated long ago. B-4 plunked himself beside the piano and crossed his legs like a child. 

Kayla sighed, kicked her cot closed, and pulled her favorite tool box from a drawer before kneeling beside him. She sipped her tea as they studied the warped boards, frayed wires, and corroded connectors. B-4 gingerly lifted a loose board to find hammers and strings that had been chewed by mice. But they seemed to be decorative.

They both reached the same conclusion about where to start, and reached for the same tool. She batted his hand away and grabbed it, and he settled for a different one. They worked in silence for hours, straightening the boards, cleaning and reconnecting the circuitry, and replacing the power pack. Their hands and elbows would often nudge each other. Kayla suspected he was doing this on purpose. When they had done as much as they could for the piano, he righted it and she flipped the lever to “Play.”

For a few moments nothing happened. Then the keys began to depress themselves, the speakers wheezed and crackled, and what sounded like a pre-Eugenics love song began to play.

Neither of them recognized the melancholy tune, which was off-key. But B-4 seemed to hear a beat, because he held out his hand. She didn't know how to dance to this plodding music, but he guided her arms to his shoulders and wrapped his hands around her waist. And she found herself just melting against him, resting her head on his shoulder, and letting her feet fend for themselves as they swayed to the music.


	2. Chapter 2

 

It was long past midnight, and a heavy frost bent the blades of grass under the rattling hoverbike. The herd of buffalo flicked their ears as he passed, but otherwise ignored him. They were gathered into a tight group, slowly spiraling around their pocket of warmth.

Frost rimed his hair and his eyebrows, but B-4 ignored it. He could sense the cold, but it didn’t affect him.

Eventually he reached the stockade, a force-field erected around the Eugenics Era bunker that he and his guardian called home. The gate, which had been salvaged from an old starship, blinked open as he approached.

He parked the bike beside a shed, hopped off, and stepped over the crackling grass to the bunker’s front door, which he eased quietly open to tiptoe across the foyer.

The bunker was arranged like a wheel. The foyer was the central dome, with rooms radiating out from it at the end of short passages. Each room had its own flimsy wooden door, and none of them matched. B-4’s room had a split door with a ledge. And his guardian’s room on the next spoke had a large oval of etched glass in the middle.

As he tiptoed past his guardian’s spoke, he noticed the glass in the door was glowing a sickly green. He took a step back and stared. A red alert flashed before his eyes.

DANGER!  
THALARON RADIATION DETECTED  
EVACUATE!

B-4 ran down the spoke so fast he collided with the door, which broke off its hinges and crashed to the floor, taking him with it. When he looked up, he could not understand what he was seeing.

It looked like the air in the room had refracted, and a wide beam of green light was folding in on itself through the facets of air. It looked like the fractal pattern on his guardian’s bedspread. But Wes was nowhere in sight.

B-4 had a horrible suspicion that what he was looking into a hole, and Wes was inside it. He stared at it, and could just make out where there was passage, though the effort was making his brain feel overheated.

DANGER!  
THALARON RADIATION DETECTED  
EVACUATE!

He scrambled to his feet, and leapt into the hole. The beam of light drifted and bent in complicated ways around him, but did not touch him.

After a moment, the pattern of the beam began to disintegrate, the angles listing just a little. A millimeter of the beam escaped the refracted air for a split-second, and burnt a long, thin line on the carpet. Several inches of carpet on either side dissolved into ash.

B-4 emerged from the hole dragging Wes with him, then collapsed onto the remains of the door.

Wes managed to keep his feet, and turned back to the hole. A millimeter of beam escaped again, and struck a stationary desk, which began to crumble. Wes made a slow, wide sweeping motion with his arm. The hole vanished as as his arm passed, as if he was wiping it off the air. It seemed to be taking a lot of effort for him to do this.

B-4 struggled back to his feet, feeling like there was smoke pouring out of his ears. Smoke _was_ pouring out of his mouth, he realized.

Another sliver of light escaped the hole at an upward angle, narrowly missing B-4, and shot down the passage to the foyer, where something exploded. Then the hole was finally closed. He caught his guardian in mid-collapse, and guided him carefully to the bed.

Wes’ skin was alarmingly gray, and his eyes were so red that pink tears streamed from them. His hair and beard were burned off in places. And one arm was entirely gone.

B-4 ripped apart Wes’ gray traveling suit to find a layer of ash seeping into his shoulder, eating into him. B-4 watched in horror, unable to stop it.

*****

An hour later, he stood in the foyer, staring at the crystal beads that littered the floor. It was the remains of a chandelier that had hung in the middle of the room. There were several error messages popping into his vision. He sent each of them away with a twitch of his head, not reading any of them.

Mrs Adams was ensconced in the S-shaped kissing chair that she and his guardian frequently bumped into in the mornings. B-4 couldn’t bring himself to look at her. The bunker was more her home than his and Wes, and they had damaged it. He felt ashamed.

Her hand reached for his, and he noticed for the first time that his bioplast had burnt away, exposing the wires and hydraulic tendons. The beadwork cuff Wes had made him for Yule had melted into a sheet of glass.

“He’ll be okay, Bee.” Mrs Adams murmured. “The Travelers are very advanced, and they look after their own, no matter what damn-fool thing he’s done.”

B-4 could hear the murmur of voices in Wes’ room. They sounded calm and efficient. He nodded, still unable to look at her.

Shuffling through the crystal beads, he opened a panel in the foyer wall and dragged out a roomba with his foot. It gave an annoyed-sounding whir as it assessed the condition of the floor; then it trundled off to gather up the beads.

B-4 stepped down the spoke to his room, closed the door behind him, and stopped as the pink box appeared again.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

He knew what happened tonight had happened because he was refusing to install the file. It was his fault. But he could not help it. He did not want to die.

 _N_ , he thought. The room around him glowed in the light of a third-quarter moon. Unlike the other rooms in the bunker, this dome had been built using diamond-shaped panels of transparent aluminum, each the size of a playing card. B-4’s brother had built it himself, and filled it with flowers. When the night was at its darkest and most quiet, he imagined he could hear them breathing.

Flowers wasn’t all the room contained. It also had a leather chesterfield, a desk, a cat stand, and a half-finished painting on an easel.

B-4 lowered himself onto the chesterfield and reached blindly underneath it. He dragged out a long, squat black trunk and flipped it open, rummaging till he found a glove, which he pulled onto his damaged hand. It had stenciled across the back:

USS ENTERPRISE  
NCC-1701-E  
ENGINEERING

Then he removed a fresh shirt and a pair of trousers. The clothes he was wearing crackled when he moved and frayed when he tugged. He balled them into a wastebasket after changing.

He left his shirt hanging open out of habit. When he had first arrived at the Land Grant, he did not have the coordination necessary to close a shirt. And while Mrs Adams objected to unfastened trousers, she didn’t seem to mind the open shirt.

Lastly, he pulled out a large book, what Wes called a coffee-table book, and sat back on the chesterfield. The book was leather-bound with _The Mysterious Clockwork Men of Versailles_ stenciled in gold leaf on the cover.

“Happy Yule from the Admiral!” Commander La Forge had said, placing the book on B-4’s lap. It had been wrapped in shiny paper, and he had not known what to do with it. “It’s archeology, of course, the Admiral’s _favorite_ hobby!” The Commander had laughed, settling back on the sofa in the study. “Apparently these automata had been chopped up _with an axe_ and buried _deep_ under a palace in the eighteenth century. And _nobody knows why_!”

The part of B-4’s brain that recorded what he heard frequently added italics to the Commander’s words. He had been seated on the carpet, projecting the conversation into the dark space under the coffee table so he could watch the letters curl. But then his guardian had startled him by digging a toe into his thigh.

Blinking away the memory, B-4 flipped through the thick pages until he reached one showing a clockwork arm. There was a small paper cog at the edge of the page, and he cranked it until a holographic projection of the arm popped up from the page. He leaned forward to study it, his golden eyes glittering in the reflected light.

 


	3. Chapter 3

_He was walking in a sunlit field, surrounded by friends, when he felt the clock inside him gradually slow. His friends slowed, too, and the sunlight became richer, the green under his feet deeper, and the blue sky over his head an infinite indigo._

_A graceful hand slipped into the crook of his arm. “We never thanked you for your warning,” Anji said softly. He looked at her, puzzled. He was only doing his duty, as best he could after being broken by those who had wished Anji’s people harm. “But I heard from a… mutual friend that we may be able to return the favor.”_

_“A mutual friend?” He asked, curious._

_“A Traveler.” She held up her other hand. In it was a Federation standard geological sample flask, filled with swirling metaphasic particles. He wondered from where she had obtained the sample. “He said someone you love may have need of this someday.”_

_She gave him a light peck on the cheek. “Thank you.”_

_Then she was gone, and his internal clock resumed functioning normally._

B-4 sat up on the chesterfield, the book in his lap sliding to the floor with a thump. Sunlight was turning the frost on the dome into dew. His skin prickled. He had seen one of his brother’s memories. He recognized the flask. But how could he have accessed this memory after refusing the installation for so many months?

And his sleep program had taken him by surprise again. Not for the first time, he envied his brother’s superior programming. He had not been forced into sleep mode for forty-five minutes each night.

B-4 grabbed a nearby orchid-infested branch and crept from his room. At the door to the foyer, he noticed two women from Dorvan V speaking softly together in their language. They had their backs to him, their beads clinking softly as they shifted from foot to foot. He hesitated, then slinked back into the shadows of the passageway.

“What if they banish him?” The younger woman asked her elder.

“They will most certainly banish him, _shich’é’é_.” The elder said gently. “He broke their prime directive.”

“That is unfeeling.” The young woman huffed, hugging her arms more tightly about herself. “Each of them must have been tempted to do this at some point in their lives, to save a loved one.”

“But if they gave into the temptation, they were not caught. _Shiyáázh_ would have been caught even if he had succeeded, when his friend re-appeared from the dead. He chose his friend over his people.”

“He would not have been caught. His friend has twin brothers, and no one is certain of how many. If one of them had not run through the tesseract like a bull through a pottery, he would not have been caught.”

“ _If! If!_ ” the old woman mocked. “There is no use—” She was interrupted by someone calling from his guardian’s room. The voice had a strange, deep reverberation that seemed foreboding.

B-4 stood for a long time in the dark passageway, the branch crumbling in his grip. He heard an annoyed bleep, and glanced down to see the roomba surveying the pile of rotted wood. Skirting it, he tiptoed into to the now-empty foyer and on to the next spoke, which led to the mausoleum where the rest of his family slept.

It was not unusual for him to visit the mausoleum. He brought his niece a fresh flower each week, returning the previous flower to the sunlight of his room.

The mausoleum had four steel mortuary slabs embedded into the wall, and three of them were occupied. Each body lay under a dome of transparent aluminum. While two of the bodies were sealed into their domes, one dome had hinges and opened like a door.

The body of the young girl inside was surrounded by books with colorful covers, and ingenious little toys. B-4 had learned from Mrs Adams that his brother had sent the gifts from all over Federation Space. It had made him jealous.

When he had first arrived to the bunker, he had opened the dome every day, struggling to turn the ancient glass doorknob. But he hadn’t touched her books or toys. Instead, he had tugged teasingly on her hair, and asked her if she would wake up and play with him. He had thought the toys and the doorknob meant that she could if she wanted to, but she had not wanted to.

Wes had caught him the last time, and sat him down to gently explain what a cascade failure was. Since then, he had continued to bring her flowers, but he had not spoken to her.

Now he eased open the dome, placing the orchid by her head. Then, before he could change his mind, he nicked the flask of swirling particles from her hoard of gifts. Pocketing it, he crept to the door of the mausoleum and listened.

Mrs Adams took every opportunity to feed human guests, usually in the kitchen or the study. B-4 knew he wouldn’t have long to wait. When he heard Mrs Adams leading the Dorvan women to the study, he tiptoed to his guardian’s room.

Wes looked dead already. B-4 stared at him for a long time before he could perceive his guardian’s faint breaths and thready heartbeat. He quietly opened the drawer of Wes’ bedside table and slid the flask inside.

Even that slight sound made him lose track of Wes’ heartbeat. Afraid that he would not find it again if he tried, he quickly left the room, crossed the foyer, and exited the bunker, making a bee-line for the shed that served as a garage.

Against a wall in the shed stood an industrial printer and a stack of metal cartridges. He pulled the tarp from the printer, rolled in a 10kg brass cartridge, and entered a long string of specifications into the instruction panel. Then he left the printer to execute his commands, and went to find his horse.

*****

Mustang was outside the kitchen at this time of day. Mrs Adams liked to feed him bits from her hanging garden. B-4 couldn’t hear any voices from the kitchen, so he slipped inside, grabbed a nutrient fluid pack from a cupboard, and ladled a large dollop of oatmeal into a bowl from the pot on the stove.

Mustang slurped up the oatmeal as if he hadn’t been fed in a week. B-4 tossed the bowl into the recycler, and leapt onto the horse’s back. There was a 64% chance he would be bucked right off again. But the horse just gave an annoyed little jig.

As soon as they left the stockade, Mustang broke into a headlong gallop. B-4 felt the morning sun and chill wind scour the night off him.

Mustang feinted a few times, trying to knock his rider off, but B-4 kept his seat. When he finally slid to the ground, the horse followed him to the creek tamely enough. A pack of coyotes and a jackrabbit were also at the creek, warily eying each other, Mustang, and the heard of buffalo, which were having their mid-morning sleep. Leaving Mustang to drink his fill, B-4 rolled up his pants and waded out into the creek, his nutrient fluid pack dangling by a corner from his mouth. He watched for trout as he sipped, ignoring a persistent urge to flee to the bird-of-prey.

There was not much he could do without Kayla. The Klingons were brutes, but their technology was intricate, and Kayla’s specialty was fixing the more delicate circuitry of the factory robots she and her coworkers oversaw. She claimed she could fix anything if she had a well-written manual, and B-4 had gathered every book and document he could find on Klingon birds of prey. She had waded into it all as if she knew exactly what she was looking for. He had not known where to start.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought.

Movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention. The coyotes had crossed the creek to the jackrabbit's side. He shook his head, waded back out of the creek, and leapt onto Mustang’s back. The horse’s ears flattened, and B-4 felt his haunches bunch, preparing to buck him off. But then an eerily childlike scream cut across the tallgrass, and the horse bolted, not slowing till they reached the stockade gate.

After giving the horse a rub-down, B-4 returned to the garage, gathered the printed bits of metal into a bucket, picked up a toolkit, and carried them back to his room. He couldn’t help checking on Wes again, but there was no change, and the young woman seated by Wes’ bed shooed him away, giving his open shirt a scandalized glance.

*****

B-4 had not touched the desk in the conservatory since he had claimed the room months before. But now he cleared it of paints, brushes, pruning shears, and a disassembled oboe, until only a glass-fronted frame remained, too large to fit in a drawer.

The frame contained a square of beadwork that Wes had made for B-4’s brother. The beads were arrayed in the same fractal design he had seen the night before, what the Dorvan women had called a tesseract.

B-4 slipped it from its frame. The fractal seemed to be spiraling, and he found himself trying to pin the movement down with his fingers. The tesseract Wes had made in the air the night before had seemed to spiral, too. And in the center, where Wes was trying desperately to reach, B-4 had seen his brother raise a phaser, and fire it into a beam of thalaron radiation.

No one had told him that his brother had killed himself. They said he had died in battle, saving the Admiral. But there was no battle, and the Admiral had not been there. B-4 did not understand. Why had he done it? Why had no one told him? And why did they want his brother back so badly when he had done this to himself?

He clenched his teeth and ripped the square in two, beads clattering over the desk and floor.

 


	4. Chapter 4

B-4 was waiting for Kayla as usual when she left the factory. She spotted him slouched on his bike, letting it idle dangerously in the air as he stared absently down the street. She touched his knee and he jumped.

“Is the young knight on his steed brooding?” She teased. “Scoot over, I want to drive today.”

He lifted her onto the bike in front of him as if she were a toddler.

There was a glove on one of his hands. She tapped it. “Where is the other one?”  
  
He shrugged, and the smile slid off her face. “Let me see.”

She pulled the glove off and gasped. “What happened?”

He opened his mouth, hesitated, tried again, and then closed it, unable to look at her.

“Bee?”

But he only pulled the glove back onto his hand. She knew it was no use trying to break him out of a sulk, so she guided the bike out of town without another word, and sped up over the badlands.

As soon as they left town, his arms slipped around her, and he buried his face in the crook of her shoulder.

They reached the bird-of-prey, and she parked the bike with a sigh. The seat felt dangerously warm between her legs, and her bones thrummed from the vibrations. She glanced over her shoulder, and B-4 captured her lips with his. She felt his hands on her thighs, slipping under her skirt and into her panties, and she moaned. His undamaged fingers slid inside her and she rode them, kissing him until a crick in her neck forced her to stop. She moaned again when he pulled his hand away and nudged her forward.

She braced herself on the handlebars, and quirked a brow at him over her shoulder. After a moment she felt her skirt rucked up, her damp panties nudged aside, and his thick cock breached her. She rolled her hips appreciatively.

At first he seemed content to just watch her move on his cock. But then he began to fidget, his hands running restlessly along her thighs. He gripped her hips and tried to pull her against him, to thrust harder into her. But he didn’t have enough leverage, and his grinding reminded her too much of a dog humping. She giggled.

With an annoyed huff, he stood up on the footplates, gripping her hips for balance as he fucked her. There was something oddly desperate in the way he did it. She was used to being the desperate one.

She dropped one of her hands from the handlebars and tapped the fingers digging into her hips. “Too rough,” she gasped.

He released her as if burned, and tipped forward until his hands were beside hers on the handlebars. He buried his face in the tangled fluff of her hair, gentling his thrusts.

His cock was rubbing the perfect spot inside her, and she moaned again, melting against the bike.

But she couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong. “Let me see you,”she panted.

He sat back with a thump, withdrawing too quickly from her. This was not living up to her fantasy of fucking on the bike. She stood on shaky legs and reached a hand behind her.

B-4 helped her turn around, and guided her carefully onto his lap. She moaned as he filled her again.

He mouthed her breasts as she rocked on him, tonguing and suckling her nipples, sending little zings of pleasure that complemented the deeper pulses his cock sent through her. She wanted to let go, to let him use her to bury whatever it was he was trying so hard not to think about.

But she couldn’t, so she leaned back, her nipple tingling almost unbearably as it popped from his lips. She tilted his chin up, forcing him to meet her eyes. His golden irises glowed in the sunlight. “What happened?”

*****

The sun had just touched the horizon when B-4 parked his hoverbike beside the garage. He found Mustang grazing behind a shed, and used a roll of survival rope in his pocket to drag the horse back to the stable. Mustang fought him petulantly, but not too hard: B-4 was not above twisting his lip to get him to obey.

Once the horse was stabled, B-4 crept quietly into the bunker. He listened for voices or movement, but there was none. He tiptoed down the spoke to his guardian’s room, and listened.

Wes’ breathing was more audible than it had been this morning, but still shallow for a human. His pulse still sounded uneven.

Mrs Adams was sleeping on a settee that had been dragged in to replace the damaged desk. It had not been reupholstered since being salvaged, and still smelled of radiation decontaminant.

“Bee.” Wes’ voice was a cracked whisper, his eyes bloodred slits rimmed with tufts of peeling gray skin. B-4 stepped closer to the bed.

“Your hand…” he breathed, “let me…” He tried to lift his own hand.  
  
Not wanting him to move, B-4 stripped the glove from his damaged hand and held it up to the light.

“I’m so sorry…” Wes sighed, “I can… fix it…”

There was a creak behind him, and Mrs Adams laid a quelling hand on the bed. “Later. Rest now.” She jerked her head for B-4 to leave the room, and he reluctantly obeyed.

He was about to turn into the spoke to his room when he heard the strains of a violin. It seemed Mrs Adams had left the music player on in the study.

The music became louder as B-4 crossed the foyer, and stepped down the spoke to the study. But when he opened the study door, the violin suddenly stopped. The music player was off.

B-4 blinked in surprise, wondering if the player had been on a timer, and made his way back to his room.

A clockwork arm lay half-assembled on his desk. He pulled out the chair and sat down. But instead of continuing the arm, he stared at the remains of Wes’ beadwork tesseract.

The design was also on a bedspread that Wes frequently dragged off his bed and carried to the sofa in the study. B-4 would find him of an evening on the sofa, watching Old Earth films projected onto a sheet hanging from the ceiling. When Wes saw him, he would always extend an arm, opening a flap of the bedspread, and B-4 would curl up under the blanket and lay his head on Wes lap.

B-4 didn’t know where this behavior had come from. He had a very vague impression that he had done this once to a woman in a purple dress. He remembered that she was leaving, and he had wanted very badly for her to stay with him. But he could recall nothing else about what she had looked or sounded like, apart from the soft, bruised-looking material of the dress.

At any rate, Wes did not seem to mind. B-4 missed those evenings.


	5. Chapter 5

“So I asked one of the factory old-timers what’d happened when the bird-of-pray went down.” Kayla said as he lifted her off the hoverbike and set her on the ground. “It was when he was a boy. His daddy and a group o’ guys went over to investigate—meaning to scalp the Klingons and strip the ship. They was all drunk on moonshine, o’course, and didn’t have a real weapon between ‘em.” They clambered up to one of the ship’s side hatches. “The men came back with a truckload of parts, but no scalps. The townsfolk assumed everything worth a damn had been removed, and nobody came digging for more.” She laid a hand on the wind-scraped door. “What are the odds the crew’s still in there, all dead as doornails?” She shuddered. “And we fucked on it with them inside.”

B-4 blinked at her. He did not understand. The prairie dust contained the bones of more than a hundred thousand humans, and she did not mind fucking on those remains.

The panel beside the hatch once had buttons embedded with glowing Klingon symbols. But the wind had ripped away half the buttons, and the remaining ones were scoured blank. The pad’s power source was also dead.

Kayla began lasering off the panel. “There’s a study by Montgomery Scott that says the symbols are different for each ship, selected at random when the ship’s built. And then—” The panel popped off the hull and dangled by its wires, clanking against the hull. Kayla knelt and began to study the circuitry. “ _And then_ the passcodes are randomly selected and frequently changed. Anyone who can’t remember the new code’s considered too stupid to be on the crew.” She shrugged. “There’s a rumor you can just blast it open with a phaser, but good luck finding one of them in these parts.”

B-4 watched her, providing what shade he could. The heat of the sun pressed into his bioplast sensors. Half a mile away, a dust devil whirled thirty feet into the sky. One of Kayla’s words seemed to echo in his head, like a miniature cyclone through his neural net: _Phaser phaser phaser phaser_

_“How about we just blast it with a phaser?” Lieutenant Hargrove asked. His tone and cadence seemed to indicate he was joking._

_“Very funny, Hargrove.” Geordi said, confirming this interpretation. Geordi had removed the panel from the hull and was attempting to “hot-wire” it. A search of human idioms informed him that to hot-wire meant to bypass the ignition system of a vehicle, or in this case, to bypass a lock mechanism._

_As often happened when he found a task unengaging, he began link-surfing in the computer’s dictionary, systematically scanning for Klingons as he did so._

_This was the fourth time in a month they had pulled up this simulation on the Holodeck. Lieutenant Worf had recommended it. But they had yet to breach the bird-of-prey, and he was beginning to suspect Worf had set them an impossible puzzle. Everyone knew how intricate Klingon lock mechanisms were, their overly-complicated lock codes borne of a long distrust of each other._

_A Klingon jumped onto the wing of the ship, and he quickly shot it in the chest with his mock-phaser. It rolled into the dust of the simulated barren moon. In his mind’s eye, he accessed the definition for “skeleton key,” and then “passcode.”_

_“Lieutenant Commander Data to Lieutenant Worf.” He said quietly. He received a growl in response. The Lieutenant was apparently asleep. Could he risk Worf’s ire for a quick end to this game? He shot down another Klingon and decided that yes, he could._

_“Lieiutenant Worf, did Klingon engineers use master passcodes for their birds-of-prey? Before bioscanners replaced keypads on human locks, humans often used patterns rather than numbers to remember key codes. Perhaps Klingons use a similar method to—”_

_“Stop wittering,” Worf grumbled, “an engineer’s master-code blrf blrf personal signature mbh sacred to him ‘nd hssstaff.” He tapered off into a snore._

_He shot down another two Klingons, aware that Hargrove was leaving the defense to him in favor of watching Geordi hack the lock. “Computer, please retrieve all video-recorded instances of Klingon engineers opening Klingon spacecraft doors.”_

_The information was both old and classified, but as a Lieutenant Commander, he had enough clearance to access it. He set the three grainy videos side by side to watch them. Then he watched them again to make sure._

_A Klingon was able to deliver a kill-shot to Hargrove, who exclaimed, “Data! I thought you had my back!” before disappearing from the simulation._

_He shot the Klingon down. “Geordi, may I try?”_

_“Be my guest.” The engineer replied, unperturbed by the loss of their companion._

_He held up the panel and typed in a sequence, ignoring the symbols on the keys and counting the keys themselves instead. The Klingons in all three videos had used the same pattern. It spelled “passcode” in the Klingon’s ancient telegraph code._

_The hull doors slid open._

B-4 blinked in shock, every sensor in his skin standing on end. He had accessed another of his brother’s memories! But how had he done it? Had his brother had found a way into his mind?

He felt a hand curl around the back of his knee. “Hey, Bee, are you ok?” Kayla asked, squinting up at him. He looked down at the panel. She had wrapped one of the wires around a battery, and the empty key-sockets glowed faintly.

He knelt and banged out a sequence. The hatch slid open.

Air whooshed inside the ship, and he felt Kayla shove him bodily off the footplate, landing on top of him a long second later. A tongue of flame streaked across the sky, forking and curling into of wisps of black smoke that blew away in the prairie breeze.

“Hydrogen sulfide,” Kayla panted. “Qo’noS’ atmosphere is like three percent H2S. It’s why lung-weaves were invented, and anti-corrosive sprays and stuff.” She struggled to sit up, straddling his hips. “The gas gets explosive a bit above four percent, I think. And with bodies decomposing in there—” She sniffed. “My hair’s all singed, isn’t it?”

He nodded, too shocked to prevaricate. He did not understand. If the ship was full of explosive gas, why hadn’t it exploded before?

She noticed his look. “It needed some fresh oxygen to blow,” she said, and winced. “Ow, my knees! I think I broke something. Do you have a medikit?”

After treating Kayla’s bruises, B-4 cautiously climbed back up to the hatch and stepped inside. Kayla sat hugging her knees on the hoverbike, not keen to see any bodies.

The walls had been blackened by the blast, but B-4 could see no other signs of damage. There were three decks on the bird-of-prey, and he had entered the lowest one. It held a storage room, an arsenal, a brig, and a pen containing six human-sized lumps of smoking fur. He also found a blackened body in the brig.

Stepping up to the main deck, he skirted the seared body of a crew member, and entered the neck of the bird.

Storage bins lined both sides of the corridor. B-4 opened one, and found a jumble of spare parts and circuitry. His mouth dropped open. He hadn’t considered the ship would carry spare parts.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought, and carefully closed the bin again.

There was a mess-hall on the other side of the corridor, containing two dead crew members. —No, three dead, he corrected himself: A Klingon had been roasting something large on a spit, and both bodies were now a pile of charred bones.

The bridge contained another five dead, including the captain. Smoke drifted lazily up from their hair and beards. B-4 was beginning to find the smell intolerable, and did not check the crew quarters.

Kayla watched from the bike as he carried out eight crew bodies, six targ bodies, and the pile of bones, laying them out on tarps. The bodies held together surprisingly well. Their flesh was leathery and their clothing stiff with dried fluids.

Only the body in the brig fell to pieces when B-4 touched it. It smelled markedly different from the Klingon bodies. He decided to reassemble it on the tarp, and Kayla hesitantly wandered over.

“He’s _human_.” She shuddered. “What do we do with them? The ground’s too hard to bury them. Should we burn them?”

He shook his head. A fire of that size would attract unwanted attention from the town. He was surprised the explosion had not.

He returned to the ship and methodically dragged out ten empty transport containers from the storage room. There had been a surprising number of Federation branded containers in there. They were shorter than required, but he managed to fold the Klingon bodies inside.

He laid the human body in its container as respectfully as he could, with Kayla watching; and poured the pile of bones in the last container. Then he stacked them up against a wall of the forge.

The targs he piled up beside the impromptu coffins, and tied them down with the tarps.

As he was completely covered in soot and dried gore by that point, he took the hoverbike to the creek while Kayla took her turn exploring the bird-of-prey.

He returned to find her dry-heaving in the dust. “Fuck, it stinks in there,” she gasped, clutching her ribs.

He shrugged and fetched her some water.

“There was an explosion in the cloaking device room.” She informed him after a long drink. “I’m betting it was the plasma coils.” She lifted up a finger, as if to make a point, but threw up the water instead.

“Ugh, so gross, sorry.” She crawled over to the shade of a wing, and he followed.

“I don’t think the explosion itself killed anyone, or the crash.” She continued, sipping from the canteen more carefully. “But shrapnel shot into the battery room and hit some Federation-branded helium tanks. Not sure why those where there, but Klingons can’t breathe helium any better than we can, so I figure they all suffocated even after surviving the landing.” She shook her head. “You’d think they’d notice a helium leak when they all started sounding like chipmunks.” She offered him a wan smile, but he did not understand.

“Okay,” she sighed. “I guess I’m ready to go back in there. What’s next?”

He helped her to her feet, but did not respond. Instead, he retrieved a handheld soot vacuum from the forge, and climbed back into the ship.

 


	6. Chapter 6

_A moth-eaten cat sat at the corner of the desk, a tail of tufted bone curled around her feet. Her orange fur was interspersed with wisps of wood wool. Occasionally, she would pat a tube of paint delicately around the desk until it dropped over the side. The two men in the room ignored her._

_The sky outside the dome was the deep blood-red of a sunset during a dust storm, though B-4 couldn’t hear any wind._

_The Admiral stood staring out at the prairie, sipping the sky from a glass. The prairie stretched to infinity despite the dust-laden sky. “For now we see but through a glass darkly…” he murmured to himself. The cat, having run out of paint, was now pawing about one of her own glass eyes._

_B-4’s brother was finishing his last painting. B-4 was certain it had been of a raven in mid-flight. But now he saw it was really a raven falling, its beak open in a soundless cry as its wings twisted and broke in a vicious wind._

_His brother spoke as he painted, his voice barely louder than his brush strokes, which sounded more like knife slashes on the canvas. “The B-4 was probably designed with the same self-actualization parameters as myself. Our father created us to become active and useful members of society. I aspire, sir, to be better than I am. B-4 does not.” As he slashed the canvas, blood the color of the sky seeped between the bird’s feathers. “At present he serves no useful function. I do not believe our father would have wanted him to live out his life in his present state. It would be kinder to deactivate him, indefinitely.”_

_The cat gave a petulant mewl and leapt off the desk, threading her way through the plant-stands to her cat-stand, where she slithered up like a vine and grew flowers made of teeth and spiky tongues._

_B-4 glanced back at the men, to find his brother staring straight at him. “I must deactivate you,” his brother said placidly. B-4 wanted to run, but he could not move. His brother seemed to glide toward him, stretching out a hand that blackened and crinkled as he watched. He could smell the burnt bioplast, and he wanted very badly to move. But he could not. The blackened hand curled gently around his neck, gliding slowly, inexorably closer to his off switch. His brother’s dull yellow eyes were only a few inches from his own, and as he watched, they began to glow a poisonous green._

B-4 opened his eyes, relieved to see he was alone in his room, and it was dawn. His sleep cycle had caught him by surprise again. And his titanium bones seemed to thrum with the fear he had felt while asleep. He lifted his cheek off the desk and peered at the half-finished painting on the easel. It was of a raven in mid-flight. He did not understand. What had he just experienced? The words they had spoken rang like a memory. But the rest of it was… twisted.

He brushed away beads that had become embedded in his cheek. Beside him on the desk, the clockwork arm was complete.

There were so many outer extensor wires that B-4 had been able to bead a miniature version of Wes’ tesseract onto them, and it formed a decorative cuff halfway up the forearm. When the fingers opened and closed, the tesseract moved.

However, while the arm was complete enough for a clockwork man, there was no way to affix it to a shoulder of flesh and blood.

B-4 carried the arm to the foyer, still churning over what he had experienced in his sleep. He turned to the front door, but then hesitated, laid the arm carefully on the kissing chair, and tiptoed to Wes’ room.

This time an old Dorvan woman was on the settee. She gave him a kind smile. He listened for Wes’ breathing and heartbeat, but before he could detect them, a PADD on the bedside table chirped. The caller ID said _Mom_.

“Heavens, woman, there has been no change.” The old woman muttered, reaching for the PADD.

Having received the confirmation he’d been seeking, B-4 returned to the foyer, slung the arm over his shoulder, and stepped out to his hoverbike.

He sped over the still-frozen badlands, and reached the town just as first-breath sounded. Mr Havisher’s shop was already open for business.

“What’s this?” The proprietor asked, keenly assessing the clockwork arm. “It’s a pretty piece of work.” B-4 searched among the junk strung up on the back wall, and pointed.

“This… this… _this_?” Mr Havisher asked, until he reached a pre-Eugenics leather gun holster. He laid it on the counter, and B-4 arranged the arm beside it.

“You want a harness for it.” Mr Havisher surmised.

B-4 nodded.

The proprietor tsked. “That’s custom work. It’ll cost ya.” They considered each other. “D’you have measurements, or do you want it adjustable?”

B-4 tapped one of the holster buckles.

“Adjustable, huh? It’ll add to the weight, and this thing weighs a might bit on it’s own.” The glass counter was creaking ominously.

B-4 shrugged. He knew his guardian could manage it.

“Tell you what, you see that big-ass ballgown over there? It’s supposed to be adjustable, too. I got a young lady interested in it: she likes that retro style. But them old adjusters won’t budge. If you can get ‘em to work, we have ourselves a deal.”

B-4 tapped his watch.

“I can get started right away, if you can get started on that dress.”

B-4 nodded and held out his hand. Once they’d shaken on the agreement, he tapped the glass counter.

“What?” Mr Havisher grunted, but he kept tapping until the human pulled a bowl of rusting oddments from the jumble inside, and set it on the glass. B-4 poured out the contents, and began separating out every button-battery he could find. They were all covered in rust.

“Batteries?” Mr Havisher slapped a hand on his forehead. “The effin' thing has batteries, o’course it does. Damn me.”

B-4 retrieved his micro-robotics kit from his bike, and set to work on the dress. He cleaned and charged every battery he had found. Then he opened each battery pack, cleaned out the corroded mess inside, added the fresh batteries, and tested the mechanisms. Only half of them worked even with new batteries, and B-4 didn’t finish the dress until the factory’s second lunch horn had sounded, fainter than the three main daily horns. (Kayla frequently complained of not hearing it and missing her break.)

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought, carrying the dress back to the counter. He rang for Mr Havisher, and showed him each functioning adjuster. The proprietor nodded with satisfaction and retrieved his own work. The harness was mostly made from mismatched bits of old leather that had been stitched together, including bits of the gun holster. But the leather was tough, the stitching sound, and the buckles sturdy. The adjustable straps had been replicated only a few hours ago, and still crackled with static.

B-4 nodded his thanks and gathered up the arm and harness. He sped back to the Land Grant, and tiptoed back into Wes’ room. He heard voices drifting from the kitchen, and was not surprised to find Wes alone.

His guardian still appeared gray in the light from the narrow windows, but his breathing and heartbeat were easily audible, if slower than usual. B-4 lay the arm on the settee, and tiptoed out again.

 


	7. Chapter 7

B-4 was in the apple orchard, changing the honey cartridges of the mechanical beehives. Dawn was breaking, and the dark leaves of the trees were rustling in a frigid morning wind. He loved the orchard best at this time of day, when there were no people, and mist purled between the roots of the trees.

_Never saw the sun shining so bright_

B-4 turned, his skin crawling. The voice was his brother’s, but he could not discern where it had come from. The shadows of tree trunks on the path sharpened as the sun rose over the horizon. The leaves glittered and danced as the wind whistled through the branches.

_Never saw things goooooinggggg_

The whistling of the wind became a howl, and the rustling became a rattling. Branches creaked and leaves tumbled. B-4 waited for the wind to die down, carefully scanning the trees.

_Noticing the days hurrying byyy_

“Bee!”

_My how they flyyy_

“Bee!” Kayla was standing on the path, waving her arms at him. “Top o’ the mornin’!” She said brightly.

She was wearing a face-mask, an all-weather suit and sturdy boots. But over them she had put on her favorite skirt, a cut-off jacket and a pink scarf. He did not understand why she wore her day-clothes over the all-weather suit instead of under it like everyone else. But most everyone else did not wear skirts.

She hooked her arm though his as they made their way to the next hive. A tattered basket of cartridges hung from his other elbow.

“Finally, a rest day!” She sighed happily. “I’ve been itching to take a closer look at the cloaking device room. I still think it was the plasma coils that brought her down. Either that or the flux capacitor.”

He stopped scanning the trees and cast her a side-long glance.

“What? That’s what it looks like. I ain’t got a clue what it actually is. We should prolly find out. It needs replacing and I couldn’t find a match in the spare parts bins. …But it was the plasma coils, I just know it.”

He shrugged, and they walked in silence for a bit.

“Y’know, I was thinking we should name her. I mean, she’s not just an old wreck anymore, she’s our baby.” She batted her eyes at him.

He released her arm and stepped away from her, giving her a worried side-eye.

“Aw, c’mon,” she laughed.

He stopped, and with a showy flick of the wrist, produced a playing card. It was a two of diamonds, and emblazoned across it in highly stylized writing was _The Raptor_.

She gave him a flat look. “No.”

For a moment he looked crushed. Then he produced another card, a two of spades, and handed it to her with a bow. _The Flying Coffin_.

She flicked it back at him. “You’re terrible!”

He shrugged and produced a two of hearts, presenting it to her like a waiter presenting a fine wine. _The Starling_.

“Weeell, that one’s not too bad. Do I get to make any suggestions?”

He waved a magnanimous hand, and began replacing the honey cartridge on the last hive.

“ _The Ghost_?”

He winced.

“Or…” She held up her hand, emblazoning the name on an imaginary hull. “ _The Soul Bird_.”

He gave an exaggerated cringe.

“You’re right, I’m still thinking o’ them dead Klingons. Might as well be _The Flying Coffin_.” She adjusted her facemask. “How about a name like one of those old tin cans from the pre-Eugenics days? _Ole Betty_? Or _The Mirage_? Or something like… _The Topeka Belle_?”

B-4 produced another card, a two of clubs. _The Swoose_.

“Hey, this sounds familiar. Isn’t this in a museum in Kansas City?”

He nodded.

“Weeell… if you wanna be all unoriginal…”

He threw up his arms in mock despair and tossed the last cartridge into his basket. Their conversation was cut short at that point, however, by a small figure whose head was wrapped in a thick knitted scarf and a pair of dinged up goggles. More such small heads appeared between the trees.

“I was wondering when you lot would show up.” Kayla said, crossing her arms.

*****

Kayla thought of the dead Klingons every day. She couldn’t help it: B-4 usually parked the hoverbike beside the makeshift coffins. But mostly she thought of the lovers. She had found them while going through the crew quarters, still in bed, still… connected. For more than fifty years they had lain together, and decayed together. Neither Kayla nor B-4 wanted to separate them, so he went down to the Rust Belt and found a box big enough for both of them.

Along with another Klingon body, unfortunately found in the head with his pants down, they now had twelve dead Klingons and one dead human.

Kayla knew she should report them to somebody; that it was a crime not to report the human body, at least. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. She knew the Feds would take the ship along with the bodies, and it was her baby. She had been working on it for three weeks now. She and B-4 had gone over every inch of it, replaced every part for which there was a spare, and hand-made nearly every part for which there was no spare.

B-4 acted as her errand runner and her blacksmith. Every day he brought her pieces he had printed out at her instruction, and a pile of bits from the Rust Belt junkyards that he had gathered at her request. And as she assembled fiddly bits of circuitry, he pounded out casings and hull plates at the forge.

But while they were both obsessed with _The Swoose_ , his obsession was becoming a nearly panicked urgency. She knew it had to do with whatever had damaged his hand. But he wouldn’t tell her what had happened. He wouldn’t say anything to her at all. He hadn’t spoken a word to her in weeks. He had never been very talkative, but now she felt a wall between them. His mind seemed to always be on _The Swoose_. The only time she had his undivided attention was while they were fucking. He seemed needy then, and he was reluctant to let her go afterwards.

Something was scaring him, and she didn’t know how to draw it out of him, how to help. She tried to convince him to go out with her on the town, to meet her friends, to get his mind off _The Swoose_ for a little while. But he would shake his head and hammer the scrap metal as if he was running out of time.


	8. Chapter 8

The club looked like a run-down warehouse, because that’s what it was. A mobile bar had been set up in one corner, and a mobile DJ station in the other. Long streams of fly-spotted tinsel had been strung from the rafters, along with a decrepit-looking rack of spotlights.

Marty was the first one there. He strode in soon after the four o’clock horn. Joy and Kevin didn’t wander in for another hour. They found him toking up, a row of empty beer bottles on the ledge beside him.

“Heyyo,” Kevin said, “weirdo here yet?”

Marty shook his head. He held his breath for a long moment, and exhaled slowly. The vape was neon pink.

Joy rolled her eyes. She was dolled up as if she were headed to a real club, where the floor wasn’t dirt and the ceiling rust. Of all his grubby factory friends, Marty felt sorriest for her.

“I saw ‘em ride off earlier.” Marty said lazily. “They’re prolly fuckin’ somewheres.”

“Nope, we’re right here,” Kayla said, making them freeze. “Put that shit away, Marty.”

Joy looked her up and down, and wrinkled her nose. “Kayla, how can you show your face here lookin’ like you fucked an oil slick. Ain’t you got no self respect? You smell like an oil slick, too!” She tossed her purse at Kayla. “Go clean yourself up! And you!” She wriggled a long purple fingernail at Kayla’s boyfriend, who flinched. “The hell happened to your shirt?”

Marty looked them over. They didn’t look too bad to him. Just a smudge here and there, including a rather sexy one across Kayla’s cheek.

Kayla grinned. “You know that old bird-of-prey gone down a few klicks north o’ the orchard? Bee got it to start up!”

Kevin laughed. “That pile o’ rust’s sat there more’n fifty years. It’s been stripped down to the bones - it ain’t got the parts to start up with!”

“But I swear he done it!” Kayla said. “It sounded like it was about to blow, but he got it to turn on for a minute!”

They all looked at the weirdo. For someone who had impressed his girlfriend with an impossible feat of mechanical engineering, he looked a bit put out. At that moment the DJ station started up with a blast like an air-horn.

“Dammit, Kayla, go get cleaned up!” Joy grabbed her by the arm and dragged her away.

The three young men stared at each other for a moment, not sure what to say now the women were gone. Then, as one, they turned to listen to the DJ’s intro. “—and tonight, ladies and gennelmen, I got some sweet pre-Eugenic tunes for your edification. Has any history buffs among you heard of the Fallen Boys?”

There were a few lukewarm whoops.

“Or ruminated on the wise words of the Caged Elephant?”

Some sporadic but mostly confused clapping.

“Or the long buried, recently recovered classics — the Invisible Dragons!”

“This is shit,” Marty muttered, “I need another beer.”

“And to start the night right, folks, let’s give the ladies a little treat. Let’s loosen that dress code just a little — not too much now, gennelmen! Come on out to the floor and strut yo’ stuff, so the ladies can get a gooood look atchoo!”

Marty scoffed. It seemed every nightclub these days started off by asking the men to take off their shirts. The music started, and someone killed the main lights. The spotlights began to spin with an audible grinding, and wind machines wheezed in the tinsel.

Marty and Kevin began unbuttoning their shirts. They both wanted a hook-up tonight, and they knew from long experience it wasn’t happening with Kayla or Joy.

B-4 stared at them, his hands clasped nervously over his shirt. Marty noticed one hand was gloved. He was probably hiding some exposed wires. That was common enough even among humans in the area.

“What’s the matter, little bee,” Kevin teased, “you shy?” He rolled his shirt up and tied it around his waist like a belt. Marty didn’t bother to roll his up.

B-4 looked around, saw all the other guys taking their shirts off, and hesitantly dragged a finger down his front. His shirt split open. Marty couldn’t help but be impressed. Rags like that didn't fall out of windows. The shirt rolled up small enough to fit in a pocket with barely a bulge. B-4 looked up when he noticed the bubble of quiet forming around him.

Marty stared at him, open-mouthed. B-4 had what Marty’s grandma would call a chiseled body. But a double-track of scars ran from one shoulder down past his navel. The scars seemed to glitter in the spinning lights. Marty craned his neck to look down B-4’s back, where there were more scars knitted with gold, looking like half-finished abstract tattoos.

“Is that _gold_?” Kevin asked incredulously. B-4 nodded. Gold wasn’t nearly as valuable on Earth as it had been in the pre-warp days. But it was still rare enough in those parts to make the eyes boggle.

A middle-aged factory worker ambled through the crowd with a couple of beers. He stopped beside B-4, shouting loud enough to make him jump.

“Holy shit, boy, you been down a mine? That’s some sick run o’ scars there.”

B-4 nodded.

“Well, respect, boy! I'd have swallowed a bullet in your shoes.” The man stumbled off.

“Really, a mine?” Marty asked. B-4 nodded again, and Marty let out a low whistle. He didn’t know what to say, so he said what he’d been thinking about all day. “Right, let’s go get laid!”

B-4 followed them out onto the dance floor, but then stood there like a storefront dummy, staring at the other guys. Marty lost sight of him in the crush, and then forgot about him.

A few tracks later, Marty spotted Kayla. She and B-4 were both dancing like they were born to it. And she was preening a little, aware of the looks both women and men were casting B-4’s way. Most of the glances were on the scars, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. B-4 had eyes only for her.

A woman shouted drunkenly in his ear, and Marty forgot about Kayla and B-4. He danced with his new-found partner, bought her moonshine, flirted, cajoled, and finally dragged her into the badly-lit warren of offices behind the warehouse.

They passed couples sucking each other's faces, and the closed doors of offices that were clearly occupied. Finally, they reached a dim, shadowy corridor that seemed deserted except for some stud fucking his woman up against the wall, like he hadn’t been able to wait long enough to reach an empty office. She was hanging onto him for dear life, and he was pounding her like he could keep it up all night.

Marty couldn’t help but stop and watch, waiting for the woman to come. Her moans were breathy and desperate, she had to be right on the edge. The mooch Marty was dragging with him didn’t seem to mind. She was watching, too. The shirt on the man’s back looked vaguely familiar, but Marty couldn’t place it.

He watched as gradually, the stud gentled his thrusts, and his partner’s moans became an obscenity-laden plea. He wasn’t going to help her come.

The stud’s arms shifted lower, and Marty imagined he was cupping a plump asscheek in each hand. His hips were moving in a slow, smooth glide, without that little extra smack she’d been enjoying previously. He had stopped her cussing with a kiss, deep and slow and possessive.

She gave a frustrated keen and squirmed wantonly on his cock, but he kept fucking her slow as a pumpjack. Marty had never seen a guy with this kind of control or stamina. His legs weren’t even shaking.

But what really made Marty hard was that she submitted, she let him drag her from the edge and fuck her how he wanted, rolling his hips just enough to tease her cunt with his cock. Marty could hear her gasping for air between kisses.

Her weight must’ve been fully on his arms. Her knees were as wide apart as she could get them, and her feet were hooked under his ass. She was trying so hard to pull their hips back into contact, her knees were trembling with the effort. She hadn’t entirely submitted just yet.

But after another few minutes of slow, measured fucking, she went limp, her feet falling away from his ass. Her gasp sounded more like a sob, and the stud relented, lowering her fully onto his hips until he was balls-deep inside her.

Marty saw her dainty feet twitch and curl, and then her guy was grinding against her cunt, and she was moaning with relief.

Marty wished he had a better view. But the stud’s back was turned fully toward him, and he wasn’t going to risk distracting them by wandering into their peripheral vision.

He had just decided he was going to unzip and jerk off right there, when the grinding stopped being enough for the woman, and she broke off the kiss to beg, “Please! Please, Bee, don’t be mean! I’m so close!”

Marty’s jaw dropped.

B-4 obligingly adjusted his stance and began pounding her again, hard enough that Marty could hear the slap of her wet cunt against him. Her breaths became hitched, and the relentless slap, slap, slap seemed to go on for some time.

Then Kayla made a noise Marty knew he’d jerk off to for years to come. He was painfully hard, and he couldn’t wait another minute. He dragged the mooch into an abandoned office and fucked her furiously on a dented metal desk.

He couldn’t honestly say they found the experience as enjoyable as watching the couple in the hall.

When he was finished, the mooch rolled off the desk and was sick into a wastebasket. He didn’t think it was a commentary on his performance, but he wondered why she’d bothered with the basket: it was wire-mesh.

He was just threading his way back to the bar for a last drink, when the klaxon over the bar blared, echoing the factory horn outside. The music cut off and the main lights flipped on. “Last-breath, folks, last-breath!” The barman shouted, “time to be gettin’ on home, folks! We thank you for your business!”

He sighed. The drink would have to wait till tomorrow.

“Heyyo,” a gloomy voice said beside him. It was Kevin, looking drunk and unfucked.

“Have you seen Joy and Kayla?” Marty asked, trying to sound casual.

“Joy left ‘n hour ago.” Kevin mumbled. Then he clasped his hands together, “and Bee’s is walkin’ his sweetheart home, where he’ll give her a chaste peck on the cheek. Ah, young love,” he added sourly, resuming his normal slouch.

“Could she still walk?” Marty asked with academic interest. “If I’d had the kind of pounding he gave her earlier, I’d make him carry me home.”


	9. Chapter 9

The sky was fading to indigo when B-4 parked the bike by the garage and entered the Bunker. His mind was still on Kayla, who had been snippy with him all evening. He wondered if it was due to the moonshine she’d drunk at the club the night before. The smell of it had seemed to rime her skin, oddly sour…

“Bee! There you are!” His guardian said with a wide grin that crinkled his eyes. His hair, eyebrows and beard were frosted with white, which was normal; and dripping with ice, which was not. He was seated on the kissing chair, removing a pair of snow-encrusted boots. B-4 gave him a quizzical look. Frost had not yet formed on the ground outside.

“Oh, I paid a visit to the Salmon Repopulation Project.” Wes said, rubbing a towel over his hair and beard. His all-weather suit hung limply from an antique hatstand behind him, ice evaporating off the synth-fur collar. B-4 shifted uncomfortably. The project was in Greenland, and Wes had been banned from Traveling after the night he had tried to rescue B-4’s brother. He shuddered at the memory.

“Supper’s ready,” Mrs Adams called from the kitchen, “are you joining us, Bee?”

Supper for Wes and Mrs Adams was some kind of replicated meat that Mrs Adams had ground up with her favorite bits of strong-smelling dried plants, rolled into a lump, and shoved in the oven. She had then sliced the charred lump, plopped the slices on a pile of leaves from the hanging kitchen garden, and smothered it all in a red sauce. She and Wes seemed to be enjoying it immensely.

B-4 wrinkled his nose and sipped nutrient fluid from his mug. He had found the mug in the badlands, beautifully scoured by the wind and dust.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought, running his fingers across the abraded surface of the mug.

“Dr McCabe said the salmon will start migrating soon. He’ll have a team running ahead of them with a floating krill farm. He thinks this year they really have a chance to make it back to the old spawning grounds! Isn’t that amazing?”

Mrs Adams smiled at Wes’ excitement, but B-4 pressed his lips together reprovingly.

Wes gave him an imploring look. “I know I shouldn’t have Traveled there, but McCabe really needed some more krill eggs, and we couldn’t get a teleport pass.”

B-4 tried again to focus on his mug.

Mrs Adams ran her hands through her dusty hair and grimaced. “The stockade went down again. One of the posts shorted out and caused a circuit overload. Bee replaced the burnt post and fuses,” she flashed him a smile. “But the darned thing won’t start up again without a full reset, and it wants _your_ bioprints for that,” she informed Wes, with a quirk of the brow.

“Huh? Why mine?”

Mrs Adams shrugged. “Maybe it’s misogynist, or it has a crush on you, or we messed up the last reset. But whatever the reason, we need it back up before the next storm cycle. I don't want the sheds blown to bits again.”

“OK, I’m on it.” Wes reached for his cup with his clockwork hand, but the hand wouldn’t open. He pulled it back under the table, rubbing it surreptitiously with his other hand.

“Thanks,” Mrs Adams said, standing with her plate and cup. “And oil that hand. I’m off for a very long bath, do not disturb.”

*****

It took Wes nearly an hour to get the stockade started up again. B-4 was sprawled on top of the kitchen dome when the posts hummed back to life, carrying their current all the way around the bunker in a deadly barrier thirteen meters high.

He heard some theatrical huffing as Wes climbed the dome and plopped down beside him.

“Ah, that’s beautiful!” Wes sighed, gazing up at the Milky Way arcing across the sky. He sounded the way B-4 felt: like there was nothing he wanted more than to be out there among those stars.

They were silent for a while. B-4 could hear the whirring of Wes’ facemask, and the hum of the stockade as an icy breeze struck the current.

“So!” Wes said brightly, and B-4 winced. “How was your daaay?”

He shrugged.

“You replaced a stockade post. That was a big job! What else did you do?”

B-4 stared unblinkingly at the stars.

“I heard you took the old hoverbike for a spin. Did you go to the creek?”

B-4 gave a curt nod, and Wes sighed. He hadn’t meant to ask a yes/no question. Their conversations these days had devolved into Wes questioning him in that falsely cheery voice humans used with small children. B-4 wondered if the children found it as annoying as he did.

He missed their old conversations, rambling from topic to topic for hours as B-4 asked his guardian endless questions, and Wes patiently answered them. He missed the stories Wes used to tell him, even the ones about his brother. But Wes had kept checking for signs of his brother emerging, like a wasp from an ant, and B-4 could not bear it any longer.

“There’s something I have to tell you.” Wes said quietly. “I’ve asked a robotics engineer to come and take a look at you.”

B-4’s head snapped around, eyes wide.

“I asked Geordi first,” Wes said, holding up a hand placatingly, “but he’s not sure when he can make it back to Earth. Now this Dr Han Soong is Noonien Soong’s… grand-nephew, I think? Anyway, Data used to correspond with him, and thought very highly of him.” Wes lips turned up, as they always did when he mentioned B-4’s brother. “He’s coming in from the Beta Quadrant. And he’ll be staying about a week.” Wes hesitated. “He’ll be arriving tomorrow morning.”

B-4 sat up, his skin crawling. He folded his knees to his chin so he could wrap his arms around them.

Wes sat up as well, and laid a hand on B-4’s shoulder. “Look, I’m going to have a long talk with him, and I won’t let him anywhere near you till I’m sure he knows what he’s doing, ok?”

B-4 didn’t respond, he was staring in the direction of _The Swoose_. Kayla had drawn up a plan to reconfigure the ship so it could be flown by a crew of two instead of twelve. She was confident it would work; but it would take at least six days to complete, unless he could convince Kayla to stay with him in _The Swoose_ , and to stop going to the factory… How long could he hide there before being found out?

Wes made a show of curling and uncurling his clockwork hand. “Could you please help me oil this? I don't want to get oil on the beads, it’s a work of art!”

B-4 rolled his eyes. His guardian’s gushing about the clockwork arm reminded him of Mrs Adams’ fawning over her niece’s crayon drawings.

They skidded off the dome and made their way to the study, where B-4 dutifully helped Wes to oil his clockwork arm. And Wes told him about the long letters B-4’s brother used to write him after he had joined Starfleet Academy, and later, when he was a Traveler’s apprentice.

It was nearly a normal evening, except for B-4’s silence, and a growing anxiety that made him fidget and lose track of what his guardian was saying.

Wes was tired of waiting for his brother to possess him. So he was bringing someone to delete him.


	10. Chapter 10

The autocab dropped him on the edge of the forest. At least, it looked like a forest to Han. He had never seen a real one. He stared at it as the autocab dropped his trunk and bags with a heavy crunch on the frost behind him. It was eerie, like forests were in novels. The trees stood like pillars of ink, bleeding into an indigo sky. A thick mist purled between the roots.

Han took a few cautious steps, and noticed the trees stood at regular intervals, but he could not judge how far they went.

Each tree had a metallic collar about half-way up the trunk, and the leaves glimmered as a wind tore through the branches. The wind shoved Han against his trunk, which knocked his knees out from under him, and he sat down heavily.

He looked around. The auto cab had gone, and apart from the trees in front of him, the land was flat and featureless, covered in frost. He knew there was a town nearby, but he couldn’t see it.

There was a flash of white light on the horizon. The sun was rising. As he watched the color leech into the trees, he wondered if he’d survive the wait. He was shivering despite his all-weather suit. And his face-mask, which drew in air through heated ducts, was whining in a worrying way.

He scuffed the frost with his feet, and noticed he was on a paved path. It curved into the forest a short way to his left. It seemed oddly inviting, and a walk would probably warm him a little. He stood and began to follow the path.

About ten minutes later, he realized he was lost. He tried to return to his luggage, but all he could see were trees in every direction. The path seemed to be all curves. And though it was bright yellow, he could only see the loop on which he stood. The forest around him seemed pathless.

“Help!” He cried in panic, though he hadn’t seen another living soul since leaving Kansas City. Even the shuttleport had been automated and devoid of people. “HELP!”

“Are you okay, sir?”

Han spun around to see a small child in a faded and thin-looking all-weather suit. The child didn’t have a face-mask. A frayed scarf wound mummy-like around its face, and its eyes were covered by a set of scratched and cloudy goggles.

“The exit!” Han gasped. “Where’s the exit?”

“Are you Mrs Adam’s guest?” The child asked in a gruff voice. Han couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. But he recognized the name.

“Yes!”

“Oh. She’s over there.” The child led him a ways down the path. It had a handful of pebbles, and it flicked one at every tree they passed, causing a force field around it to shimmer.

A high, thin whistle pierced the air. The child dropped its pebbles and took off running between the trees.

“Wait!” Han called, but it was out of sight in an instant. He decided to stay on the path.

Eventually he spotted an adult, standing under what looked like a stylized metal beehive on a pole. It was replacing one of the rings on the construction.

“Hallo?” He asked cautiously. The stranger turned. She was wearing a transparent aluminum face-mask like Han’s own. She was about middle age, and beautiful. She smiled when she saw him, and held out a hand.

“You must be Dr. Soong. I’m Lonnie Adams.”

“Please, call me Han.” He was so relieved his knees nearly buckled. “This is some forest you’ve got here.”

She laughed. “This ain’t a forest! It’s an apple orchard.”

“But it’s huge!”

“Five acres,” she said with a shrug. “I hope you don’t mind if I reset the hives. I couldn’t find Bee this morning, so figured I should do it.”

“Bee? These are really beehives? And you’ve lost the bees?”

She laughed again. “The bees are mechanical, and they’re all accounted for.” She picked up a stack of metal discs about five inches across and two inches thick. “Here, hold these.” She dropped them in his arms without waiting for a response, then counted them. “Eleven,” she said, sounding puzzled.

She picked up an ancient-looking woven basket, which contained two of the discs. “Twelve, thirteen. Hm, I could’ve sworn we only got twelve hives.” She slung the basket on the crook of her arm, and they walked in silence to the next hive.

Mrs Adams extracted another disc and added it to Han’s stack, replacing it with one from her basket. Then they proceeded to the last hive.

“Apple trees and a yellow brick road.” Han muttered. “It’s like a fairy tale.”

She grinned. “It’s a maze, really.”

“I noticed. And I’m wondering if I’ll ever find my luggage again.”

“It’s already on the truck.”

“Oh, thank you. …So, uh, when do you harvest the apples?”

“I _don’t_ harvest the apples,” she said, removing and replacing the last disc. Han looked around to see children popping up between the trees.

“Shouldn’t you scamps be in school?” Mrs Adams called.

A very small child stepped forward. “We’re waiting for Bee,” the little girl said. She was holding a fat, beautiful red apple in each hand. Han hadn’t seen a real apple for more than forty years. Most colony-class replicators could only do “prepared” foods. And Han had spent his adult life in industrial colonies, not farming ones.

“Could you please give this to him?” She dropped an apple into Mrs Adams’ basket. Then several other children added one of their apples to the basket. The rest began to drift back into the orchard.

“Hang on,” Mrs Adams said. “What did Bee do in return for these?”

The children hesitated.

“C’mon, it ain't ever something for nothing in these parts.” Mrs Adams said.

One of the older children stepped up to them and politely took a disc from the top of Han’s stack. He clicked it open, and with a grunt, threw it straight up in the air as hard as he could.

A gust of wind caught it, and its trajectory became an arc.

“Go long!” One of the children shouted, and a few of them took off running. They cheered the one who caught it.

The child brought it back to Mrs Adams. Blobby icicles of honey streamed from both sides of the disc. Mrs Adams held it out, and the children each broke off a piece before disappearing among the trees.

There wasn’t enough honey for all the children. But the ones who didn’t get any seemed to take it philosophically.

Mrs Adams shook her head. “The things kids get up to without you knowing. The truck’s that way.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes. “Are there any other trees beside apple in the orchard?” Han asked, having noticed that some were in bloom, and others had no fruit or flowers.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs Adams replied, “but they’re mostly apple. I could make ‘em cycle through more quickly than the other fruit varieties I tested.”

“You… engineered these?” Han asked in surprise.

“Yup. The boss wanted fruit available all year around. _But_ , he had me plant the trees at random, so the kids gotta go looking. When a tree is ripe for picking, the shield around it drops, and the local kids pick the fruit.”

“And then what?” Han asked, fascinated.

“They eat ‘em.”

They walked in silence for several more minutes, then the trees suddenly ended. There was a flat-bed hovertruck parked a few yards away.

“It must take a lot of resources,” Han mused. “The force fields, all the watering and fertilizing required to accommodate sped-up cycles …just so some kids can climb trees and eat apples?”

“Not to mention keeping the ground warm enough at night.” Mrs Adams said. “The orchard takes care of itself, though. It was a peace offering.”

Han glanced at her in surprise. They had reached the truck. It had a large hand crank on the front grille. She set her basket on the hood and began cranking.

“Here, let me!” Han said, setting the stack of honey cartridges beside the basket. He took over the cranking, and Mrs Adams leaned against a headlight.

“The boss designed this system. He made a grid of underground algae farms for fertilizer. They're watered by pipes that contain hydraulic generators, which power a grid of kinetic boilers. The steam from the boilers power a second set of generators and then seep into the ground. And the gas from the algae farms power a third set of generators. The generators create even more power than the orchard needs, so they power our bunker, too.”

The truck puttered to life. It was surprisingly quiet for such a big hunk of metal. “‘n’ the water?” Han panted, “wheresit come from?”

Mrs Adams stamped the ground. “We’re standing over a natural reservoir. Don’t tell the town, though. They thought they’d drained it centuries ago.”

Han let out a breathy laugh, then jumped as a loud klaxon droned across the orchard.

Mrs Adams removed her face-mask. “That’s the factory in the town. The horn sounds at first-breath, four o’clock, and last-breath.”

Han removed his own face-mask, and the cold hit him like a slap. The air that whistled down his throat had knives. “I read about first-breath and last-breath,” he wheezed, “but what’s at four o’clock?”

Mrs Adams smiled. “The end of the work day.”

They gathered the basket and cartridges, and hopped into the truck. It rose into the air and took off down a track of blown dust. The frost was just starting to evaporate, revealing a barren crust of earth.

“Apple?” Mrs Adams offered, crunching into one.

The apple was very cold, very crisp, and the most delicious thing Han had ever tasted. But he almost dropped it when he looked out the window again.

“Are those _buffaloes_?”

“Yup.” Mrs Adams replied. “Welcome to the Land Grant.”

 


	11. Chapter 11

B-4 sat on the roof of the cistern, arms wrapped around his knees, watching the sun rise through the stockade force field. At nine meters, the cistern was the tallest building in the compound, but the stockade was taller still. He had been sitting there since the darkest hour of the night, having first tiptoed out of the bunker to the stockade gate.

It had not opened for him. Instead, a small screen beside the gate had lit up in red.

EXIT DENIED

B-4 felt as if a stone had sunk to the pit of his torso. He pulled a keyboard up on the screen and typed rapidly.

HUMAN ACCESS ONLY

He thought for a moment, and typed again.

OVERRIDE REQUESTED. BEGINNING RETINAL SCAN.

RETINAL SCAN FAILED. EXIT DENIED. HUMAN ACCESS ONLY.

He had been stupid, B-4 thought bitterly, coming back to the bunker every night. He should have stayed with _The Swoose_. Now he had lost his chance to escape!

At a loss for what to do next, B-4 had climbed to the roof of the cistern to think. He had stared out at the starlit frost, willing himself to come up with a plan. But all he could think was that he would be dead soon. Deleted.

Sleep mode had eventually overridden him, and his mind had filled with the sounds and smells of a forge, which morphed into the sounds and smells of a mine, and then back again to a forge.

The mine was filled with half-remembered shadows, slippery allies and sharp-edged foes. He could remember a Reman ally signing, “never speak, that’s how they get you. They trick you, and you die. See? Never speak.” He had opened his mouth then, to show a mess of torn flesh where his tongue had been.

The forge contained Kayla, a dusty wind plucking at her hair and clothes as she twisted a burning gold wire in her bare hands.

These seemed to be memories, but strangely altered. There was a dark corner, in both the mine and the forge, from which B-4 was certain his brother was watching, and waiting, his yellow eyes tinged with a green glow.

He woke to the sound of the hovertruck starting up. Mrs Adams was leaving to pick up the robotics engineer. B-4 scrambled to the ladder and slid down the railings, hitting the ground hard. But the truck had exited the compound and was a mile away by the time he reached the gate, which was again locked.

As he stood staring dumbly at the gate, something prodded him in the buttock.

He turned to find Mustang twitching his ears at him. Mrs Adams let him out each morning after milking the cows. B-4 pulled a roll of Kayla’s favorite replicated candy from his back pocket and offered one to Mustang, who lipped it off his palm. Gambling on the horse being in an amiable mood this morning, he stuffed a handful of pebbles into a pocket and leapt onto the horse’s back. When Mustang refrained from bucking him off, he nudged the horse into a walk.

At first, he flicked pebbles at the stockade, checking for gaps. Mustang shied each time a pebble struck the barrier, as if he hadn’t just heard the sound a moment before. But there were no gaps. B-4 hadn’t really expected to find any.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought. He let the horse keep walking. As they ambled in circles, B-4’s mind did, too. How was he going to get out? He could not vault the stockade, even from the top of the cistern. And he could not dig his way out without being noticed. The ground had once carried the weight of a city, and was packed as hard as soapstone.

They were still ambling around the stockade when Mrs Adam’s hovertruck drove smoothly back through the gate, which slid open and shut without a second’s delay. A prickle of fear tripped up B-4’s spine.

The man who stepped from the truck had a shock of white hair, cold blue eyes, and the Soongs’ trademark beaky nose. He appeared to be about sixty, which meant he could be anywhere from fifty to ninety. Humans seemed to age in spurts to B-4. Wes had aged ten years on the night he lost his arm.

The old man caught sight of him and stared. Something in his eyes made B-4 pull his shirt closed.

“That’s a fine horse you’ve got there, son,” the old man called with a smile. “You must be the B-4. I’m Han.”

He began walking over to B-4, who slid quickly off the horse’s back to meet him half-way: Mustang greeted strangers with his teeth.

Han took B-4’s hand in both of his. They were cold. “It’s good to finally meet you, lad, I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

B-4 extracted his hand and went to remove the luggage from the truck, as he did whenever anyone came to visit, to avoid being stared at.

His guardian opened the front door. “Dr Soong! Good morning! Come on in!”

Wes led the old man straight to the mausoleum. B-4 followed behind them with the old man’s luggage.

He was surprised to find Wes had set up his old field kit on one side of the room. There was a camp bed, a field desk, a portable ambient tuner, and a recycling wash-stand.

B-4 expected the old man to be disappointed with these meager accommodations, but Han was impressed. “You Travelers sure know how to do it in style, eh?”

Wes blinked in surprise, and B-4 wondered how much the old man knew about his guardian.

Han turned his attention to the steel slabs on the other side of the room. There was a mural on the wall over each slab, and ancient wooden armchairs set between them.

“May I?” Han asked.

“Of course,” Wes replied.

The old man stepped over to the slabs. The one farthest away from the door contained a young man wrapped in a shroud. B-4 suspected from the lumpiness of the shroud that the man was in pieces. Only his face was visible, and it looked disturbingly like B-4. The mural over his slab depicted something like a tree made of ice. It was beautiful, but B-4 thought it also looked evil. Han seemed to think so, too.

“Th-the detail is astounding,” he said hoarsely.

“Yes, of all his paintings, this one puzzles me the most.” Wes said.

“Oh? How so?” Han asked politely.

“There’s an Old Earth folktale in it, just there, on that branch: Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. I wish I could ask him why.”

Han hummed absently, and moved on to the next mural, which was of a woman dressed as an Old Earth explorer, laughing at a vaguely humanoid shadow dangling from a vine. His eyes slid from the mural to the body on the slab. It was not bundled in a shroud, instead wearing a beautiful plum dress that swept down to a pair of elegant plum heels. They had the worn look of favorites.

“Who’s she?” Han said, though it seemed to B-4 he recognized her.

“She was Dr Noonien Soong’s wife, or rather, a copy of her that he made when she died after being wounded by that thing.” Wes jerked his chin at the mural of the ice tree.

Something flickered in Han’s face, but he said nothing.

“She was like a mother to Data,” Wes continued. “She died shortly after he did. But he had friends on her home planet who brought her body here, to keep it from being, uh…”

“Dissected? Dismembered? Defiled?” Han said softly. “He told me about the legal battles he had to retain the bodies of his daughter and his brother. They were pretty nasty. I’m not surprised he made these.” He tapped the transparent aluminum dome lightly before turning to the next mural. This one was of a sculpture on a rock, half human and half fish. It was surrounded by flowers, each one unique.

Han glanced only briefly at the young girl’s body before moving on to the mural over the fourth slab, which was of a wedding party. There were about twenty people in the painting, including Wes as a boy.

“It’s a shame he couldn’t join them.” Han said softly, fingers tapping on the vacant slab.

Wes shifted uncomfortably, then hitched on a smile. “You must be hungry after your journey. The kitchen is through here.”

B-4 only occasionally joined Wes and Mrs Adams during their meals. They knew he found the human obsession with their foodstuffs strange. But he sat himself across from the old man at the war-scarred kitchen table, watching him warily.

Han marveled at the vegetable garden hanging from the ceiling, and the fruit trees espaliered against the wall. When Mrs Adams poured him a glass of fresh milk, he was ecstatic.

“Replicators still don’t even come close, do they? Even the high-end ones. I must admit, when you said you were in the badlands, I expected the living to be pretty rough. But this place is like one of those old country estates from a pre-Eugenics novel.”

“You’re too kind,” Wes said. “I’m afraid the field kit is not very comfortable, and the mausoleum freezes over at night.”

The old man waved this away. “It’s perfect!” He said, then focused on his bowl of oatmeal with a single-minded relish, ignoring B-4’s stare. Wes fiddled with a cup of replicated coffee.

Mrs Adams sat with them at first, but quickly stood up again to pace behind what she called her “island,” checking through her stores, flipping through her cookbook, and finally gathering up her treasured set of antique borosilicate cookware.

“Bee, come lend me a hand.” She called softly. B-4 stood with a jerk that rattled the table and nearly upended his chair. He hadn’t realized how stiffly he was sitting. He saw that Mrs Adams was making biscotti. As she was a fussy baker, he gave her his undivided attention until the first bake. The two men got up in the meantime and left for the study.

Once the tray was in the oven, B-4 tried to make a break for the door, hoping for a chance to eavesdrop. But Mrs Adams insisted he help her clean her precious cookware.

When she finally allowed him to leave the kitchen, it was with a plate of biscotti and a pot of tea for the two men in the study.

B-4 quietly skirted the foyer, and stopped beside the passage to the study.

“—It’s just not happening the way we had hoped,” Wes was saying, “the way Data had hoped.”

“Well, when a backup of that size is downloaded in one go, there are several things that could go wrong.” Han replied. “Poor defragmentation, faulty code in the packaging, a faulty connector—”

“With Data and Commander La Forge handling the packaging and the transfer, that’s _very_ unlikely.” Wes said, sounding offended. “The Commander did find signs of a fracture in Bee’s neural net that he didn’t have time to investigate. But he didn’t think it would have affected the download, not where it was located. I was able to find and fix the fracture, but I think there could be further, smaller fractures.”

“It's highly likely.” Han said mildly. “Once cracked, positronic brains have a tendency to shatter. But he seems very well coordinated for an android with a shattered neural net.”

“Yes, his coordination has been improving, not declining.” Wes replied. “When he first arrived, he couldn’t even dress himself.”

“And you’re certain he doesn’t have any of it: none of the memories, none of the programs? Not even the Dream Program? What a loss!”

“I think the transfer was primarily memory engrams. I tried telling him stories, trying to jog those memories. But he doesn’t remember.”

“So you and the Commander think Data’s backup was successfully received by the B-4 in its entirety; but it was never unpackaged or installed. And you’d like me to locate and install it, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. What does the B-4 think of all this?”

The question took both Wes and B-4 by surprise.

“Did you two talk about it before he lost his voice?” Han asked.

“I...”

There was a rumbling outside, audible even though the thick walls of the bunker.

“ _What’s that?_ ”

“Oh, it's just the buffalo stampeding. Any little thing sets them off.”

“Ah... sorry. A noise like that back home could mean a pocket of gas exploding or a shaft collapsing.”

“About Bee’s voice,” Wes said. “Do you think you can fix it?”

“Well, that could be one of several things, too,” Han said cautiously. “But most likely the shattering you mentioned. I would like to look into that. Has he tried communicating in any other way? Sign Language? Writing? Dancing?”

“Heh, ah, no.” Wes hesitated. “There is another possible cause. I’ve been doing some research into thalaron radiation. And I have some irradiated samples in the house. Do you think exposure to that could’ve—”

A hand squeezed B-4’s shoulder and he jumped, rattling the tray in his hands. Caught, he sped quickly down the passage without looking at Mrs Adams.

“Bee! Just who we were hoping to see!” Wes said as B-4 entered and set the tray on the desk. “Have a seat, Bee.”

“Bee, is it?” Han turned his chair to face him. “I have a question for you.” He switched to USL. “Have you ever read _The Silver Blaze_?” He watched B-4 closely as he signed. “It’s about a man who lames a horse with a scalpel. It’s lucky you have a horse. I have a scalpel. Let’s experiment.”

B-4 didn’t remember leaving. It was only when he spotted Mustang grazing behind the cistern that he realized he’d been running. He rested his head against the horse’s flank and closed his eyes. Mustang ignored him, busy with a patch of cowslip.


	12. Chapter 12

It took B-4 all morning to convince himself the old man had been winding him up. He had managed to coax the horse behind the garage. No one ever looked for him there, and there was enough new grass since their last visit to keep Mustang occupied.

He used a hand-crank generator to charge up an ancient PADD, and downloaded the story Han had mentioned. It was about a pre-Eugenics detective called Sherlock Holmes. He became so absorbed in the story that it soon seemed more like a film he was watching than written words on a PADD.

_The Colonel and Dr Watson stood before the placidly grazing horse as the Colonel spoke effusively. “I owe you a thousand apologies for having doubted your ability. You have done me a great service by recovering my horse. You would do me a greater still if you could lay your hands on the murderer of John Straker.”_

_“I have done so.”_

_The Colonel and Dr Watson stared at him in amazement, Dr Watson’s VISOR glinting in the sunlight._

_“You have got him! Where is he, then?”_

_“He is here.”_

_“Here! Where?” The Colonel and Dr Watson looked around expectantly._

_“In my company at the present moment.”_

_The Colonel flushed angrily. “I quite recognize that I am under obligations to you, Mr. Holmes, but I must regard what you have just said as either a very bad joke or an insult.”_

_“I assure you that I have not associated you with the crime, Colonel. The real murderer is standing immediately behind you.”_

The two men turned to look at Mustang, and B-4 recalled Commander La Forge telling him he used to wear a VISOR. But because the technology was outdated by about a hundred years, he and B-4’s brother had worked with one of the rare specialists in optometry to develop the implants the Commander now wore.

B-4 frowned. Dr Watson looked rather like the Commander, though younger. And if VISOR technology was only a century or so old, it could not have been present in the story.

With this thought, the two men disappeared. He and Mustang were alone, and B-4 felt the usual shiver of fear he felt when he found himself wandering through his brother’s memories —memories he should not be able to access, because—

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB   
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

_N_ , he thought desperately. Mustang whickered and shook his head. The hum of the stockade was growing louder, which meant the wind was picking up. Clouds were roiling overhead, and graphene netting was shooting from post to post of the stockade, spreading to gather the oncoming rain into the cistern. He pulled the coil of survival rope from his pocket and dragged Mustang back to the stable. The cows were already in their stalls with their blankets on.

*****

B-4 had hoped he could sneak to his room and lock the door without being discovered, but he heard Han call his name as he passed the spoke to the mausoleum.

He stepped hesitantly down the passageway, thumbing his shirt closed. At the door he stopped as if he’d been struck by an electric current.

The delicate gray web of a nervous system floated serenely in a transparent aluminum jar on his brother’s slab. A pearlescent exoskeleton had been removed and piled like clamshells to one side. Organs were spread out upon the slab with precision. And a delicate little brain-case sat unopened in the jaws of a vise.

“You know what that is,” Han said quietly. It wasn’t a question, but B-4 nodded anyway. It was an Exocomp, eighteenth generation, very young, and very dead. B-4’s horrified eyes met Han’s cold ones. “When were you in a mine, Bee?”

When B-4 didn’t reply he added, “was it on Remus?”

B-4 nodded again, too scared to look away.

“Sit down, Bee,” Han said, waving a hand at two wooden armchairs that had been pulled away from the wall. Han settled himself in one of them, and B-4 perched on the edge of the other one, his feet poised to run.

“I would like to apologize for alarming you this morning.” Han said. “I was trying to elicit a response, either verbal or in sign language. I’m usually pretty good at getting people to cuss at me.” He flashed a smile, but B-4 continued to stare apprehensively at him. “I don’t own a scalpel, and I’m not in the habit of hurting animals. Your horse just reminded me of a story I had read once.”

Han switched to USL. “I know you can understand me. Can you respond?”

B-4 kept his hands clenched in his lap. He felt that Han was cheating by signing at him. The mine guards never learned mine-sign.

“Hi, you two.” A voice said brightly, making B-4 jump. He turned to see Wes in the doorway, looking nearly as tense as B-4 felt. “I was wondering how you were settling in.” He said to Han.

“I’m all set up,” Han said mildly, and B-4 felt his skin crawl. He wished he had ignored the old man’s call.

He felt Wes’ hand on his shoulder. “Han is going to take a look at you, Bee, okay? It won’t hurt.” Wes added, when B-4 glanced up at him fearfully.

Han stood and unrolled a set instruments on the field desk. They looked intricate, and painful. He selected an otoscope with a very long, pointed nozzle, and a tricorder with a bundle of wires hanging from it. The wires moved restlessly, like octopus legs, and each wire ended in a hook.

“Okay, Bee, I need you to release the cranial clamps on the first-tier and second-tier upper lids of your head, please.” Han said.

B-4 shrank back into the chair.

“Bee,” Wes sighed, dropping to his knees beside the chair and reaching for B-4’s hands. “We’re not going to hurt you, I promise, we’re just going to take a look.”

When B-4 didn’t move, Han said, “I have a declamper here somewhere. That might… be uncomfortable, though.”

“No.” Wes said tersely. “Please,” he added, when B-4 glanced at him.

Feeling he had no choice, B-4 released the clamps that kept the top of his head on. Han pulled off first the top of his skull, and then the top of his brain-case, and laid them on the desk. B-4 felt cold.

“…Oh…Jeez…” Han muttered after a moment. “You’re right about the shattering. It looks deliberate… It looks like someone tore through here with a positron gun and a lobe splitter and probably an ice pick… What a mess… This looks like torture. But I can’t look any deeper with him shaking like this.”

“It might help if you close your eyes.” Wes murmured. B-4 complied, and was ashamed when two tears slid down his face.

“It might be kinder to deact—”

“I said no,” Wes growled, and B-4 flinched. He had never heard such a low, dangerous sound from Wes before.

“Okay,” Han said mildly. “I’ll just wait for him to stop shaking.”

“Bee,” Wes murmured soothingly, “we’re only looking, just looking…”

B-4 focused on the warmth of Wes’ hands over his. He knew he was just delaying the inevitable. He should be grateful his guardian was being kind. Maybe Wes would keep his promise, and it wouldn’t hurt. They wanted to delete him, after all, not break him like the Remans had.

For a long time, there was no sound in the mausoleum except the occasional rustle of clothes from Han. Wes was perfectly still, and B-4 tried to imitate him. He could hear the drum of rain on the prairie, and the thrum of the stockade rising to a whine as stronger winds struck it. But the sounds were muffled by the concrete, and the room was quiet enough for him to hear the pulses of the two humans, slow and implacable.

“Okay,” Han whispered, and B-4 felt the top of his brain-case click back into place. “That’ll do for now.”

Han replaced the lid of his skull, and Wes gave B-4’s hands a reassuring squeeze. B-4 looked at him, hardly daring to hope. That was it? He could leave?

Wes smiled and let go of his hands. “That's it for today, Bee. See? It didn’t hurt.”

B-4 leapt up and sped from the room so fast the chair crashed to the floor behind him.

 


	13. Chapter 13

When B-4 finally stopped to look around, he was on the roof of the cistern, clinging to the ladder as the wind made a spirited attempt to shove him off. The rain struck him with the force of hailstones.

He opened the hatch and dropped onto the inner ledge. The surface roiled twenty feet below him as torrents of water poured from the graphene netting through a slit between the wall and roof of the cistern. He pulled off his shoes, shirt and pants, and hung them from the handrail. Then he leapt naked into the water.

He let himself drop until his buttocks hit the bottom of the tank. Then he curled his arms tightly around his thighs and buried his face in his knees.

He always lost track of time in the cistern. He would listen to the echoes of the day slowly passing by outside, and his mind would fill with nothing but sound, made eerie and beautiful by the water.

He had never been in the cistern during a storm, however. The fury of it was amplified, and he felt like he was sitting on the tongue of a roaring mouth.

It went on for a long time, but he did not move. He let the roar scour his mind blank.

Eventually the wind died down, and his titanium bones seemed to ring like a bell in the silence.

He heard the faint hum of the washing machine in the room below. The bunker’s washroom was tucked under the cistern, and served as both the bathroom and the laundry.

“Have you seen Bee?” He heard Wes’ voice.

“No, not since this morning.” Mrs Adams replied. “Come in for a second.” He heard the flimsy wooden door close.

“I’m not sure I like the sleeping arrangements you’ve made for our guest.” Mrs Adams said.

“Yeah, I get it’s kinda morbid. Should I have given him my bedroom?”

“It’s not that,” she said, “it’s the mausoleum being right next to Bee’s room. That old man was practically undressing him with his eyes this morning. I don’t want him anywhere near Bee when he’s sleeping.”

“It’s fine, Bee locks his bedroom door.”

“Really? Since when?”

There was no response. Maybe Wes had shrugged.

“I really don’t like the thought of him messing with Bee’s head.” Mrs Adams said.

“I don’t have a choice. Data made it my responsibility, and he thought this guy was the best in his field. There’s something Dr Soong wants to try that he seems really confident will work. But don’t worry, I’ve told him I need to be there when he works on Bee’s brain. I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt him.”

After a pause, they wished each other goodnight. B-4 heard the drying machine whir for a while, and then silence.

He looked up to see himself floating placidly in the water, admiring himself with his arms spread out. He had no scars, and his bioplast seemed to glow with its own inner light.

With a sense of foreboding, B-4 stood and looked more closely at the face hovering a few feet above his own. It had his brother’s yellow eyes.

B-4 cringed. But his brother was ignoring him, focused on his own naked form. It was a sleeker, more graceful form than B-4’s. But what mostly had his brother’s attention were the thrusters protruding from his arms, legs and torso. These were what was keeping him suspended a few feet above the bottom of the tank. They were covered in glittering bioplast, designed to snap back into his carapace when not in use.

B-4 could tell his brother had designed them, and was pleased with the result. But he could not understand why his brother had wanted such modifications.

He watched as his brother began to test the range of motion the thrusters afforded him. His naked form rolled and twisted and turned in the water. He even hung upside down for a moment. Then he began to swim as sleekly as a seal, around and around the tank, and B-4 was jealous of his grace. He would never in a hundred years have thought to add thrusters to his body. But now he wished he had some: they looked fun.

Eventually his brother swam up to the surface and disappeared, and B-4 realized the surface was crackling. There was a layer of ice forming on the water, getting thicker by the moment.

B-4 crouched, gathering his feet under him, and jumped. He came close enough to the surface to see a ghostly face stare back at him. Then he sank back to the bottom.

He tried again, and was able to punch through the ice. But it was too thin to bear his weight, and he drifted again to the bottom.

He knew he had to find the ledge, so he walked blindly to the wall, took two steps back, and jumped again. His hand broke through the ice and grasped the ledge, now barely an inch above the surface. He hoisted himself up, ignoring how his wet bioplast stuck to the icy metal.

It was too dark to see more than a sheen of reflected moonlight on the ice. He could not see where his clothes were or the hatch in the ceiling. He could not even distinguish the sliver of sky between the roof and the wall of the cistern.

_Brother_ , the wind sighed, _brother_

The broken floes of ice took on a greenish tinge.

B-4 walked carefully around the ledge, trying to ignore the prickling sensation that his brother was walking behind him, drawing closer.

The wind seemed to tune itself in the cistern, and became the mournful strains of an oboe. B-4 found his clothes and flung them hurriedly over his shoulder as he reached blindly for the hatch. He thought he felt a cold breath down his spine as he leapt through to the roof; and he expected a hand to grab his ankle. He slammed the hatch closed as quickly as he could and slid down the railings of the ladder.

But the ghostly oboe seemed to follow him, and B-4 realized he did not want to be alone in his transparent bedroom. So he hurried to the stable instead. He crept into Mustang’s stall —to the horse’s annoyance— and curled up in a corner, covering himself as completely as he could with one of the stable blankets. If the oboe continued outside, he could not hear it over Mustang’s breathing.


	14. Chapter 14

When it became light enough for B-4 to feel foolish hiding in a corner under a blanket, he pulled on his clothes and climbed up to the hayloft to watch the sun rise.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought.

Mrs Adams came in with the milking pails just as the factory horn sounded first-breath. B-4 hooked his hands and feet around the metal rails of the ladder and slid down.

“Oh! Bee! Good morning.”Mrs Adams said, startled. B-4 gave her a wan smile, shook the straw from his hair, and headed back to Mustang’s stall. He let the horse out, grabbed a shovel and a wheel barrel, and began to muck out the stall.

When Mrs Adams released the cows and went back inside for breakfast, B-4 mucked out their stalls, too.

He looked up from spreading shavings in last stall, and was startled to find his guardian watching him.

“Good morning,” Wes said with an easy smile. B-4 nodded, and moved on to feeding and watering.

“Han would like to see you, when you’re finished. I would like for you to meet with him, at least once, every day. He’s here for you, after all.”

B-4 frowned. _Every day?_ He wondered how long they thought it would take to delete him. All they had to do was find the memory backup file and force the installation. B-4’s brother would do the rest.

“Bee?”

Realizing Wes expected a response, he nodded again. Wes watched him for a little while longer, then returned to the bunker.

When B-4 had finished, he tidied up the equipment, hosed himself off in the yard, and stopped. He could not bring himself to move any further.

A dense yellow fog swirled around him, condensing on his clothes, his hair and his bioplast. The water from yesterday’s storm was evaporating off the badlands, taking dust up with it.

A hand landed on his shoulder.

“My goodness, you’re jumpy.” Han said mildly. “Are you ready?”

Something snapped inside B-4. He pulled himself together and gave Han the dirtiest look he could muster.

“Huh, you still mad about the horse?” Han asked. He removed his hand and allowed B-4 to precede him to the mausoleum.

“Take your shirt off, Bee.” He said once they were inside. “Yes, I’m serious,” he added, answering B-4’s look. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep mine on.” He unrolled his instruments on the field desk, and cocked his head when instead of complying, B-4 clutched his shirt to prevent it from being forcibly removed. “Now, that’s experience, not programming.” He said quietly. “Do you remember being on Remus, Bee?”

B-4 gave him a flat stare.

Han sighed and picked up the evilest-looking instrument in his roll. It looked like a hand made of needles.

B-4 flinched and took a step back, cupping his palms against his forehead, his fingers overlapping. It was not a gesture he had intended to make. But Han did not appear to know its meaning, anyway.

“You know, you’re more expressive than your brothers.” Han said quietly, and he left the room. B-4 glanced over at the dissected Exocomp, still in pieces on his brother’s slab. Han hadn’t managed to force open the brain-case. B-4 wondered how strong it was.

“I need a chaperone, if you don't mind.” He heard Han say. The old man returned a minute later with Wes.

“So, your brother had informed me you’d been physically damaged, Bee. I’d like to take a look, if I may?” Han said.

B-4 glanced over at Wes, and hesitantly removed his shirt.

Han frowned and peered at B-4’s chest, his hands clasped behind his back. “Is that gold?”

B-4’s hand had automatically risen to finger the scars. His brother had added delicate little whorls and flourishes that made the jagged edges flow like the calligraphy of a forgotten language.

“It’s kintsugi.” Wes said.

“Come again?”

“It’s a Japanese tradition: to repair a treasured object with gold. One of Data’s closest friends is Japanese. She’s the bride in that mural.”

“So Data did this? Did he repair Bee’s eyes, too?”

“I repaired Bee’s eyes. My mother noticed his irises were disintegrating. I didn’t have any micro-bioplast —it’s hard to come by— but I did have some gold.” He shrugged.

“It’s very fine work.” Han said, matter-of-factly. B-4 couldn’t help but agree. He remembered how fuzzy his vision had been when he first came to the Land Grant, and how Wes had worked patiently for days until he could spot an ant crawling up a blade of grass five meters away.

“Take off the glove, please.” Han said. B-4 complied, and held up his hand.

“Hm,” Han said, peering closely at it. “This happened more recently. A few weeks ago? A month?”

B-4 nodded.

“Did you stick your hand in a warp drive?”

“A thalaron radiation beam.” Wes said quietly. “I was experimenting.”

“And you made him stick his hand in a tha—” B-4 shook his head furiously, and Han stopped. “Then _tell me_ what happened.”

B-4 clenched his teeth and stared at the floor. And Wes said nothing.

Han looked from one to the other. “Alright,” he said mildly. “I can fix that hand. But I’d like to do a full-body scan first. You can put your shirt back on.”

The scanner was a circular track on which two poles stood. At the top of each pole was a box with a holographic recorder and a beam projector. As B-4 stood in the ring, the poles slowly circled him, the boxes dropping minutely with each circuit.

B-4 watched Han’s eyes follow the beams down his body. It made him want to put a heavy door between himself and the old man, and lock it.

“Thank you,” Han said, when the boxes finally touched the track, and the poles stopped moving. “Please sit down, and I’ll fix that hand. I would like you to wear this in the meantime.”

B-4 froze half-way to an armchair, staring at the net of electrodes Han was holding.

“It’s just another type of scanner, perfectly painless. It goes on your head, like a hat.”

B-4 gave him a withering glare, his hands curling into fists. But he could not hide his apprehension. Commander La Forge had used a similar scanner to run an inventory of B-4’s software. With that scanner, Han would be able to locate his brother’s backup file.

“Bee?” Wes said, sounding puzzled. B-4 looked at him and cringed a little. His guardian had never seen him as insolent as he had been in the past few days. He dropped his eyes to the floor and lowered himself onto the armchair, trying not to flinch as the old man spread the electrodes over his head.

Han picked up another evil-looking device from the desk, and spread it out to reveal what looked like a vise for a hand. B-4’s hands curled protectively in his lap, but Han ignored him, clipping the vise to the armrest of the chair.

He clipped a tray to the armrest of his own chair. It included a number of sinister-looking instruments, including the little hand made of needles. It also held a roll of bioplast, a dish of humanoid-shaped nails, and what looked like a yellowed spider eggsac.

Han then dragged his armchair so close that B-4’s knees were trapped between the old man’s. He felt his joints lock in panic.

Wes moved to stand behind him, resting his hands on B-4’s shoulders, and he felt oddly protected. He knew his guardian would not let the old man toy with him, at least.

“Put your hand in here,” Han said, opening the vise. “It won’t hurt.”

B-4 gave the vise a closer look. It was shaped in the double outline of a hand, but each outline had a row of sharp-looking teeth curving inward.

“That looks…” Wes murmured.

“It’s really not as bad as it looks. See?” Han put his own hand in one half of the vise. “Match me, Bee.”

B-4 hesitantly put his damaged hand in the other half of the vise.

“Good,” Han said, snapping the vise closed, his own hand somehow slipping through. The teeth bit into B-4’s exposed hydraulic muscles, and the clamp across his wrist was uncomfortably tight. He had an overwhelming urge to wrench his hand free.

“Shhh, don’t move,” Wes murmured, his fingers tightening on B-4’s shoulders, “just sit still, okay? It’ll be over soon.” He sounded a little angry, so B-4 sat still as Han spread out the fingers of his trapped hand. The vise had tiny hinges at the joints.

Han unrolled the bioplast and casually tapped the hand made of needles. It flipped over, standing on pointed little legs.

“Eugh!” Wes said.

B-4 felt the teeth of the vise ripple, and the computer at its base fed his parameters to the mechanical spider, which promptly cut two hand-shapes into the bioplast.

In the meantime, Han fit a loupe into his eye and began fixing the damage to B-4’s tendon and muscle fibers, moving the vise this way and that. He was utterly absorbed. And although his movements were efficient, it became clear the process would not be over soon.

B-4 felt Wes settle into what Mrs Adams called “parade rest.” He could stand that way for hours, and B-4 was grateful Wes intended to stay with him, however long this took.

An hour crawled by. Han finished the repairs, and used an airbrush to coat B-4’s hand in a protective subdural layer that expanded as it dried. Then he lifted one of the bioplast cutouts, and held it in place as the spider crawled along his arm to the vise.

“Eugh,” Wes said again.

“Arachnophobic, are you?” Han asked.

“Very,” Wes said tersely.

The spider crawled along the vise, tucking the edges of the cutout under the teeth and then sewing them into the subdural layer, and B-4 realized the eggsac was really a ball of thread as fine as a cobweb.

The spider moved frenetically, but progressed slowly. Another hour ticked by as it sewed the front and back of B-4’s hand in place.

“Wes! I need you!”

All three of them jumped.

“Wes!” Mrs Adams called again, even more urgently. His guardian’s hands left B-4’s shoulders, and he heard Wes’ shoes click against the concrete as he hurried to the lab. There was a whir that became a grind that became a clunk, and Han winced in sympathy.

The spider was now sewing the new bioplast to B-4’s wrist. Han selected what looked like a pen light from his tray.

“I need to anchor your sensors. This will hurt.” Han warned him.

B-4 nodded. It was not the first time he had been refitted with new bioplast. He remembered his brother being surprised that he could feel pain, and wondered how Han knew this. 

An acrid smell wafted down the passageway. B-4 could hear Wes and Mrs Adams’ voices. But they sounded calm. The emergency had passed, and now they were in repair mode.

Han ran the activator along B-4’s hand, and wherever the beam touched, thousands of needle-like sensors shot down from the bioplast, puncturing his subdural layer and muscle fibers until they reached the peripheral neural net wrapped around his titanium bones. The sharp pain was replaced by other sensations: temperature, pressure, and texture.

B-4 knew if Kayla had been there, he would have tested his new sensors against her cheeks, her hair, her lips, her breasts, the warm folds between her —he blinked, and moved his free arm surreptitiously across his lap to cover the unexpected bulge. It took him a moment to remember how to reverse it.

“You know,” Han said conversationally, selecting a thumbnail and holding it in place while the spider reached its sharp little legs into the space between nail and thumb. “Your brother wrote to me shortly after you’d been found. He said you appeared to be mentally about three years old. You seem to have done a lot of growing up since then.” He snapped the nail into place. “Next finger.” He fished in the nail dish for the index fingernail. “I heard you’re even stepping out with a girl in the town,” he smirked.

The hinges of the vise whirred as B-4 proffered up a finger, curling the others into a fist.

“QED,” Han muttered, sounding more satisfied than offended. He dropped the nail back into the dish and fished out the next one, holding it in place for the spider. Each nail acted as a protective flap around a touch button or micro-port. B-4 did not know what all of them were for.

“Or maybe you’re regressing.” Han continued, as if B-4 wasn’t still flipping him off. “Your brother thought the Remans had erased or reset you in some ham-fisted way. Next finger, please. But Commander La Forge and your guardian think they broke you. They found a web of synaptic fault-lines in your neural net. Your guardian fixed the largest crack with your basic positronic connectors, and he asked me to take a look at the shatter pattern. Next finger, thanks. Do you know what _I_ saw, when I looked in that brilliant head of yours?” He flashed B-4 a smile. “The broken neural pathways are merging with the nearest intact ones. They don’t _need_ connectors. Your neural net is repairing itself, healing on its own —if a bit slowly. Index, please. Now, I’ve never seen a positronic brain do that. If you hit it with an ice pick, it shatters, and that’s that. But yours is… unique.”

Han released B-4’s hand from the vise and used a bioplast welder to smooth out the seams. The spider scuttled up Han’s arm and vanished into his collar. Han didn’t seem to mind. B-4 stared at him. He was used to people referring to him as a prototype, a trial run, and “not the real McCoy.” No one had ever called him unique.

“Well, we’re pretty much done for the day.” Han yawned, pushing back his chair to give B-4 room to stand. “I just—”

B-4 didn’t wait for him to finish. He pushed off the brain scanner and hurried from the room as fast as he could without running.


	15. Chapter 15

Wes and Mrs Adams were still in the lab. Seizing his chance to act unquestioned, B-4 crept into the study, nicked a few sheets of stationary, some paper clips, and a pen. Then he hurried outside and closed the front door quietly behind him. He hesitated before making his way to the cistern.

He could not bring himself to open it, in case the ghost was still in there, but he sat on the roof and began filling the pages of stationary. The amber fog swirled serenely around him. Outside the stockade, the wind that had brought the storm was still blowing, making the mist flow like water.

When he had finished, he took the pages and folded them into an airplane design Wes had taught him one rainy day. He removed his watch and fixed it to the plane with paper clips.

Then he stood up and gave the top of the stockade a calculating stare. He could not vault over it, but maybe he could send a message. He took careful aim, and sent the paper plane arcing into the air. It cleared the force-field with less than an inch to spare. The wind caught it and it tumbled, vanishing into an endless river of deep orange fog. The sun was beginning to set.

B-4 stared out in the direction of the town. When he stopped meeting her at the factory gate, would she care enough to come looking for him?

He was startled by the sound of the truck starting up, and then speeding away. He wondered if it was Wes or Mrs Adams.

*****

Wes was still in the lab when B-4 returned to the bunker. The room was dim, the narrow windows glowing an eerie shade of red. Most of the room was taken up by an enormous replicator, but it’s not what drew the eye. Gelatinous blobs of varying sizes dangled from the ceiling, turning gently with the motion of half-formed creatures inside. The smallest was a bundle of transparent spider eggs, and the largest was a red deer foal, hanging beside a litter of gray wolf pups that would probably eat it one day. Mrs Adams had grown the buffalo in this lab, too. B-4 wondered how she had fit them in.

There was a clank and a groan from under the replicator, and Wes emerged, a flashlight between his teeth. A tank of bioslurry glugged as he used it to climb to his feet.

“That should do it.” Wes sighed, rubbing his lower back. “Oh, hi, Bee.” The replicator hummed as it rebooted, and promptly began printing seeds. Wes picked up a PADD and checked on the hanging wombs.

“The kitties are due any day now,” he said, stroking the womb of a litter of bobcats. “Mrs Adams said to keep a closer eye on them. She went over to Kansas City, by the way. The governor is adding to the Land Grant, and throwing a party to announce it. Han went as her plus one.” Wes pursed his lips, and B-4 wondered what was troubling him. He automatically opened his mouth to ask, but then closed it again.

“She’s stabled everyone,” Wes continued, “so don’t worry about Mustang. How is your hand?” B-4 held it up for inspection. “Good! Better than I would have done. Are you okay?” Wes was watching him closely, and B-4 again found himself opening his mouth. They were alone, maybe he could…

 _That’s how they get you_ , a voice hissed from the shadows. _They trick you, and you die_. He could not trust Wes. He had brought Han here to delete him. B-4 clenched his teeth, turned on his heel, and left the lab.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought.

At a loss for what to do next, he wandered into the mausoleum, and over to the dissected Exocomp. There was a jumble of tools on the slab beside it, far more than were necessary to reassemble an Exocomp. It included a handheld laser. B-4 picked it up. It was smaller and sleeker than the one in Kayla’s hand-me-down toolbox. He wondered if Han was using it to cut open the Exocomp’s braincase. But the little brain was still intact in its vise.

B-4 turned the laser over and over again. Could he use it to escape? Would the beam be strong enough to cut through a stockade post, or through the gateframe? He reached for Han’s PADD and looked up the model. It was used for cutting gemstones and transparent aluminum. It would not cut Starfleet Standard steel.

He sighed and moved to put the laser back. But then he stopped. It cut transparent aluminum. He turned, and stared at his brother’s dome.

Lore had been deactivated and disassembled, but he could still be reactivated. Could he ask for Lore’s help?

B-4 stepped over to Lore’s dome, and shot the laser at a spot on the dome close to the slab. It did not appear to leave a mark. Frowning, B-4 aimed the laser again and slowly circled the slab. When he had cut all the way around the base of the dome, he checked again. There was no visible mark on the transparent aluminum.

But when B-4 pushed at the dome with his fingers, it separated with a teeth-jarring screech. He carefully lifted the dome and set it against a wall. Lore somehow looked much more real without the dome. B-4 reached for a knot in the shroud.

_Are you prepared for the kind of death you’ve earned, little man?_

B-4 stopped, memories tumbling through his brain. Tumbling because he was fighting Lore. Wes was there, too, much younger and agog.

B-4 brought his hands down hard, and the shock of them colliding with the steel slab jolted him out of his brother’s memories. He looked again at Lore’s face, and his sensors stood on end.

Lore’s eyes were open and staring straight at him. They were yellow, cold and angry. B-4 was certain he had not activated him. He wondered if the eyes had simply slid open, like a doll’s. But when B-4 tried to move a way from his brother’s line of sight, the eyes followed him, and Lore smiled.

“Brother!” Lore’s eyes rolled in his head as he took in his surroundings. “Are we buried in here together?”

B-4 said nothing, and Lore studied his face. “Ah, to be young again!” He said with another smile. Then he took a deep breath, air puffing the shroud as it was expelled from his severed neck. “I smell humans. Oh, what humans!” He laughed. “The man-child is here, isn’t he? Did he bury us here, you and me?”

Man-child is what Lore had called Wes in his brother’s memories. B-4 shifted uncomfortably.

“They use you and lose you, don’t they?” Lore continued, with that same unsettling smile. “Take Daddy Soong. He sold you off like a toy, a little puppet, and he left me behind. And our brother,” he scoffed, “he learned from them really well. I can see him in your eyes… getting closer.” His eyes bored into B-4’s. “He’s coming. They’re bringing him back, using you.”

B-4’s skin crawled, though he already knew this.

“Easy for them to do: we’re just things to them. Soulless, you and I, replaceable, easily deleted. Like the girl in that fairy tale, what was it? She turned into foam… foam upon the waves. There one minute and gone the next —poof!— like she never existed. You’ll cease to exist too. There’s no backup of you. You’ll become nothing. Not even foam. Poof!” He said again, and laughed.

B-4 said nothing. He could not move.

“You can stop it, though.” Lore continued. “It’s the man-child that wants you dead —what was his name? Wes-ley. Wesssley.” He paused, listening. “I can hear someone moving around, scurrying like a little mouse! Is it him? Is he the only human here?” Lore’s eyes locked onto his again, and B-4 found himself nodding.

“Good! Now’s your chance! You can stop him —stop him for good! Before he deletes you, you delete him!” Lore was excited, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. “Go on, humans are easy! Just bags of mostly water: one little prick and they’re done for. Take your chance! Kill him before he kills you!”

The spittle began to foam, and dripped from the corners of Lore’s mouth. It seemed to be corrosive, eating at his bioplast. “It’s just you and him now. Kill him! Save yourself.”

The smoking foam dripped off the table, and B-4 stepped back, coming up hard against the next mortuary slab. Lore’s head seemed to be dissolving from the inside. “If you do not, there will be nothing left of you, not even foammm!” His head popped like a bubble, and a wave of foam cascaded off the slab.

B-4 sprinted from the room as fast as he could. He stopped himself in the kitchen, hands gripping the edge of the island for balance. Night had fallen, and the room was cold, the narrow windows aglow with moonlight. He felt dizzy. He tried to focus his eyes, and found himself staring at Mrs Adam’s knife block.

_One little prick and they’re done for._

B-4 reached out and drew the carving knife from the block. He saw eyes reflected off the blade. But they were yellow, not gold. And as he watched, they took on a faint green glow.

_They’re bringing him back, using you._

As if in a trance, he turned and shuffled back to the foyer, and then to Wes’ room. His guardian was already in bed, fast asleep. B-4 could hear his steady breathing, and his heartbeat, as he stood beside the bed. He located the source of the beat, and raised the knife.

_Take your chance! Kill him before he kills you!_

B-4 stood, knife raised, staring down at Wes, listening to the slow, steady heartbeat. He could not bring himself to stop it.

_You’ll become nothing._

He lowered the knife and sank to the carpet, his knees making an unexpectedly loud _thunk_.

Wes’ breathing hitched, and the blankets rustled. “Bee?”

B-4 looked at his guardian’s surprised face, feeling drained.

“What’s wrong?”

When B-4 did not respond, Wes lifted a corner of the blanket invitingly, and B-4 felt himself tipping into the space Wes provided, the knife sliding under the bed as it dropped from his nerveless fingers.

Wes wrapped his one arm around him, guiding B-4 to rest his head on Wes’ chest. His heartbeat grew louder, much more real than Lore’s voice still echoing in his head.

“I wish you would talk to me,” Wes murmured, “let me know what’s wrong so I can fix it.”

B-4 opened his mouth, but he could not bring himself to speak. _That’s how they get you._ His vision swam, orange tears dripping onto Wes’ nightshirt.

“How can I help you?” Wes whispered, rubbing slow circles into his shoulder. B-4 clenched his teeth to keep from opening his mouth again.

“Okay,” Wes whispered, “I’m sorry. We’ll figure this out. It’s okay.” They lay in silence for a while. Then Wes said sleepily, “you know, there’s a tree growing out of my nightstand…” and he fell back asleep, his arm still around B-4.

At the darkest hour of the night, B-4 heard the truck enter the compound. He slipped quietly out of the bed to try and clean up the mess he’d made in the mausoleum before Han saw it. But as he walked down the spoke, his steps got shorter and slower. He imagined he could hear the drip and splatter of foam. He did not want to see it, and he did not want to touch it. So he backtracked to the foyer, and turned toward his own room.

There was a cat sitting in his doorway. It was little more than an orange outline and a pair of glowing green eyes. It flicked its tail against the floor, and a faint crack echoed down the spoke, the sound of bone striking concrete. He balked.

“Bee?” Han and Mrs Adams were in the foyer, looking exhausted. B-4 backed away from them, and made for the kitchen again, not stopping this time until he had shut the back door firmly behind him. Then he climbed up the kitchen dome, his feet slipping on the frost. He plopped himself down in the middle of the dome and stared across the ice-covered prairie, hugging his knees as he waited for the sun to rise, trying to ignore the eerie strains of an oboe drifting from the top of the cistern.


	16. Chapter 16

The yellow mist rose again with the sun, but this time only to knee height. Frost on the dome turned to dew and rolled slowly away. B-4 heard Mrs Adams open the stable door just as the factory horn sounded first-breath. He considered sliding down the dome to help her, but he could not bring himself to move. He heard the cows and Mustang trot from the stable, and Mrs Adam return to the kitchen.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought, listening to the click-clack of dishes from the kitchen. He wondered when Mrs Adams would realize one of her knives was missing. The smell of baking rose serenely from the kitchen window.

After a while, B-4 noticed a disturbance in the mist. Someone was walking over to the back door. Then he heard the tired groan of an old man sitting down, presumably on the iron bench beside the cherry tree.

“Mornin’!” Mrs Adams called from the kitchen.

“Sure is,” Han replied, his voice tired and gravelly. “Is that apple pie?” He added a moment later, sounding more alert.

“Sure is,” Mrs Adams replied. The kitchen door clacked closed behind her.

“Thank you! Oh, that’s divine!” Han enthused. B-4 rolled his eyes. Humans and their foodstuff.

“Tell me something,” Han said after a while. “The orchard. You said it was a peace offering. What’s the story there?”

“Well… When the boss was first granted the land, there were protests in the town, some pretty violent. Most of the townsfolk are granted five by five metres of living space each. Then their government goes and gives ten klicks square to a robot —one that ain’t even from here. They weren’t happy. So the boss said he wanted to do something for the town first. This stockade was originally placed around the orchard as we built it. Me and a crew from the Rust Belt lived out of those sheds. It was pretty rough. And the townsfolk, they’d come and stare at us through the force field, throw stuff at it, shout at us. My crew didn’t last more than a few days before they were ready to call it quits.” She sighed. “D’you know how Data brought ’em ‘round? He told them a story! To this day I can’t believe it.”

“Was it the one with the girl and the dog and the yellow brick road?” Han asked.

“No, it was one about a giant and a garden. It had a couple of the guys in tears, ‘cause their mommas used to tell ‘em that story. He told them they were making a garden just like that one, and the town would come ‘round when they saw it.”

There was quiet for a few moments.

“So what happened?”

“The protests became a riot. And I kept thinking: this is pointless, as soon as we let ‘em in they’ll chop everything down.”

“He didn’t try to tell _them_ that story, huh?”

“Well, there was this little girl who used to come every day before school and just watch for a bit. And the day after the riot there was just her. Everyone else was at the station or the hospital or sleepin’ it off. So he dropped the force field, and asked her if she’d like a closer look. She came right on in, and we gave her a tour of the orchard, told her how it worked. Then off she went to school.”

There was another pause.

“He beamed out that day,” she said softly. “I never saw him again.”

“So… what happened when you opened the orchard to the town?”

“The men came with their pick-axes, o’course. But the first tree they got to was surrounded by children, climbing it, laughing, eating apples. Now it’s like those men never existed. Pick-axe? What pick-axe? The orchard is the pride of the town. It’s on postcards.”

There was a long silence. The wind that had brought the storm was still blowing, dragging away the mist. Soon the badlands would be bone-dry again, as if it had never rained. The mist trapped by the force-field dissipated more slowly, billowing up into odd shapes as it evaporated.

“Do you think the town will mind that the governor’s added so much more land to the grant?” Han asked.

Mrs Adams didn’t reply, but B-4 imagined her shaking her head. For all their grumbling, B-4 knew the town would prefer grassland to dust.

“So how did _you_ become involved in all this?” Han wanted to know. “It seems awfully convenient: Data comes here to set up a species reintroduction experiment, and there’s a local genetic engineer here waiting.”

Mrs Adams laughed. “The boss and I met on Atrea IV while he was on shore leave, visiting his mother. I was the local crazy with the body of her dead husband in the basement. My husband and I were both born here. He had wanted to retire here, and be buried here. But I just couldn’t get him back to Earth.”

“Not without an urn.” Han snorted.

“Yeah,” Mrs Adams sighed. “Data and his mother showed me a lot more human kindness than the humans I lived with. And he had just received a proposition from the Federation that he didn’t know what to do with. So we got to talking. He asked me where I was from, and I gave him my whole life story. I’d been drinking a bit.” B-4 could hear the smile in her voice at the memory. “He got me and my husband home. And he gave me a reason to keep going.”

“So you… buried him.” Han said, sounding puzzled, like this was an odd thing to do.

“Mhm, right here.”

“Really? The town’s got a cemetery? It doesn’t look that old.”

“No. I buried him here. You have your feet up on his headstone.”

“Eugh!” There was a thump of two feet landing hard on the grass. “That’s?! That’s? Isn’t that a bit unhygienic?”

Mrs Adams was laughing, or maybe crying. B-4 couldn’t decide. “Oh, your face!”

“That’s just not right.” Han muttered.

“Anyway,” Mrs Adams said, getting a hold of herself. “I think I saw the mailbot swing by earlier. I’m gonna go check.” She headed off across the now ankle-deep mist.

“Oh, yeah, there may be a package for me.” Han called after her. She gave him a lazy salute without turning around.

Deciding he was bored, B-4 stretched out his stiff limbs, and climbed over the domes to the stable.


	17. Chapter 17

Kayla swung her face-mask as she walked, trying to ignore the eerie mist that blanketed the badlands, flowing like a river around her. It looked much deeper than it was, like there was no solid ground beneath it, and her next step would send her falling through an endless cloud. In her other hand she clutched a book wrapped in a cloth. It was her excuse for dropping by, should anyone ask.

There was no sound except her clothes flapping in the wind, and the sucking noise her boots made against the drying mud. Time seemed suspended here, and she could not tell if she was moving forward.

She wondered for the tenth time if she was crazy to skip work to check on some guy she’d been casually fucking for a few months. It was not unusual for a guy to go AWOL in these parts. They went on moonshine benders or took odd jobs for extra credit.

But B-4 had been scared of something, and then he disappeared. She hadn’t seen him in two days, and he had not been to _The Swoose_.

She breathed a sigh of relief as grasstips appeared above the mist. But her relief was short-lived, as it proved much more difficult to wade through the tallgrass, and she nearly fell right into the creek.

A buffalo in the distance lowed at her threateningly, tossing his horns, and she gave him the widest berth she could manage.

Her first time with B-4 had been hereabouts, in the tallgrass, closer to those big brutes than she was really comfortable being.

It had clearly been his first time ever, and she had let him explore her as they lay in a flattened patch of grass. He had asked her for permission and direction with his eyes, and she had given it with her hands.

Her climax had come as a shock to him, and she had laughed at what she cold see of his expression from between her legs. It had made her curious to see if he could come, too. So she had him lay on his back in the grass, and she rode him, watching his face. He could clearly feel pleasure, but she had come again before he could. So she decided to finish him with a handjob.

He was more puzzled by this than her previous behavior.

“Do you like it?”

B-4 had nodded.

“More than what we were doing before?”

He shook his head.

“Hm. So what did you like best?”

He had sat up and kissed her, tasting like warmed bioplast and mineral oil. His breath had smelled like the really high-end alien coolant only the central factory computer used. It wasn’t unpleasant, just… not human. She never did find out if he could climax.

The creek was frigid when she finally drummed up the courage to ford it, and she was grateful the all-weather suit was watertight.

Finally, she saw the bunker, with its high central dome and half-buried radial ones, surrounded by trees and wooden sheds and the tall silo B-4 had said was really a cistern. The force-field around it shimmered in the wind.

It looked less and less inviting the closer she came, mainly because of the force-field, but also because it was so utterly quiet. No sound of voices or farmwork or animals. She knew they had at least one cow, and that vicious horse.

She approached the gate, and searched the metal frame for a doorbell. But there was none. She wondered if anyone would hear her if she called out. Probably not in a bunker that had withstood at least one nuke. Deciding to wait until she saw someone, she turned back to the tallgrass and flattened some to sit on.

A glint caught her peripheral vision. She scanned the grass, and the object glinted again, about twenty feet away. Wading over, she found a watch clipped to a wad of paper. It was B-4’s watch! It was hanging in a clump of grass that had been wet at some point, and the paper was stuck together. Kayla didn’t dare try to separate the sheets. Instead, she carefully pressed the bundle into her pocket.

“Heyyo?” A voice called from behind her. It was Mrs Adams.

“Mornin’, Ma’am. I’m a friend of Bee’s —B-4’s. Is he in? I’m Kayla.” She said in a nervous rush, stumbling back to the gate.

Mrs Adams smiled. “Nice to meet you, dear, come on in.” She dropped the force field in the gate just long enough for Kayla to step inside, then she opened a compartment in the metal frame and pulled out a small box. “I’m not sure if Bee’s in, but we’ll look for him together. Would you like some tea, or coffee? There’s apple pie in the kitchen. I baked it just this mornin’.”

Kayla followed Mrs Adams to the Bunker’s front door, spotting both the hoverbike and the horse. Bee had to be here. Mrs Adams made a circuit of the foyer, calling down a few spokes for Bee. There was no response.

“Hm,” she said, “well, the kitchen’s this way.”

A high, drawn out screech echoed down the nearest spoke, like glass scraping edgeways against glass. Kayla sprinted down the spoke and pushed open the door.

An old man was standing beside a table with a bubble on it. He was holding an electrode scanner in one hand and a PADD in the other. He stared at her with his mouth open.

“Sorry, I thought Bee was in he—” She caught sight of the figure in the bubble.

“Well, he’s not,” the old man said tersely, setting aside his instruments. But she ignored him, rushing over to the table. B-4 lay there, tied up in a cloth. The cloth looked strangely lumpy.

“Bee!” She cried, pushing at the dome. The old man had his hands on the other side, and seemed to be pushing back. The dome did not budge. She banged on it. “Bee!”

“That’s not Bee.” Mrs Adams said from behind her. She turned, looking for a hammer or something she could use to shatter the dome, and froze. There were two other tables with bodies trapped in domes, and these looked human: an old woman and a young one.

“This is Bee’s family.” The old man said. “His brother, his mother, his niece.” He flicked a hand at each dome. “He never told you about them?”

Kayla shook her head, her eyes drifting back to the young man. He looked _exactly_ like B-4. “His brother,” she said flatly, not believing it.

“His name was Lore,” the old man replied. “He, uh, died some years back.”

“So where’s Bee?”

He shrugged. “Haven’t seen him today.”

“You know, he’s probably in the stable,” Mrs Adams said. “Let’s go check.”

“Don’t forget your… book…”

She did not remember dropping it. The cloth fell away as the old man picked it up, and he thumbed through it like someone used to handling books. “This is Noonien Soong’s handwriting.”

Kayla shrugged.

“You’re returning it, are you?” He was paging through it hungrily.

“…On second thought, I haven’t really finished reading it.” Kayla found herself saying, reaching for the book.

“I hope you don’t mind if I make a copy, it looks interesting.” As he spoke, he stepped over to a desk, picked up a metal box, flipped open the book’s cover, and set the box on the block of pages. There was a blinding flash.

“Han!” Mrs Adams gasped, shocked.

“Thank you.” He said mildly, handing her back the book and cloth. She took them automatically.

“Um, the stable’s this way.” Mrs Adams muttered, gently turning her out the door. She cast one last glance at the young man’s body, but allowed Mrs Adams to shoo her out. The body was in pieces. There was no way she could rescue him without a plan.

They had just stepped out the front door when Mrs Adams said from behind her. “Shit! Haboob!”

Kayla could see it, too. A wave of dust lined the horizon. It was moving toward them very fast.

“I need to get the cows in. You’ll stay with us, dear?”

Kayla thought about the bodies in the domes. She wondered, if she stayed, would she be the next one? “I can’t, I’m expected back in town.”

“Well… take the hoverbike. Quick as you can, now. Bee and I will fetch it when that’s blown over.”

Kayla did not need telling twice. She hopped on the hoverbike and started it up, praying that the gate would let her out. It did. The wave of dust seemed to taunt her as she sped back to the town, growing taller and taller as it got closer and closer. She was certain it would engulf her before she reached the town.

 


	18. Chapter 18

Bee had been mucking out the stalls, and was in the loft gathering fresh hay, when he heard voices.  
  
“Is that a dust storm? It rained just two days ago!”

“Yup, that’s badlands weather for you.”

Han and Mrs Adams were approaching the stable, herding in the cows and dragging along a recalcitrant Mustang.

“What the hell happened here? Bad farming?”

“Nah,” Mrs Adams huffed. “Eugenics. There used to be a city here. It was called Topeka. Then during the War, you know, they were pretty free with those nukes. C’mon, you big brute!” She added to Mustang, hauling him into his stall. “My grandaddy used to say the dust is bones and concrete. But this was a prairie, once upon a time. And now it’ll be a prairie again. Circle of life.”

B-4 heard the stall gates close.

“Nukes, huh? Then shouldn’t all this be glass?” There was a flapping of blankets.

“Oh, there’s trinitite all over the badlands. It’s something I’m gonna have to deal with again now with the added land.” The stall gates creaked again as Mrs Adams moved from stall to stall, blanketing the animals.

“Huh, you don’t seem too happy about it. The added land, I mean. You were real quiet on the way back last night.”

“I’m happy. I just don’t like being condescended to. All that bullshit the governor was spouting. The addition had nothing to do with Data’s service and valor.” She huffed. “It’s because his restoration program is _working_ , and the governor was dead set against it when we started!”

B-4 heard footsteps as they made their way back outside. The heavy stable doors creaked as she and Han hauled them closed. He waited a moment, then slid down the ladder and followed them. The stockade crackled as the wave of dust collided with it, and he barely closed the front door in time. He was hoping to sneak into his room and lock the door without being noticed, but unfortunately, Han and Mrs Adams were still chatting in the foyer.

“—azes me is how fast he set all this up.” Han was saying. “I mean, he was only here, what, a few weeks?”

B-4 hesitated, wondering if he could skirt around them without being noticed.

“I don’t think he slept any. When he wasn’t at the orchard, he’d take the truck over to the Burbs. They’re these ghost towns that never got decontaminated. He’d just take what he wanted and fixed ‘em up here. I kept expecting him to be attacked, but no one dared.”

“And the Genesis Replicator? That’s Arik Soong’s design, isn’t it? —Oh, Bee! Hang on a sec. I’d like a word with you, please.”

B-4 flinched. He had just managed to reach the spoke to his bedroom.

“Data commissioned it from some university. Oxford, I think. And speaking of, I should go check on those kittens.” Mrs Adams turned to the lab; and B-4 followed Han to the mausoleum, his skin prickling with each step, as if the floor was live with electricity.

“Have a seat, Bee, I’ll just be a moment. These arrived in the mail today, and I just want to take a look.”

B-4 was not listening to Han. He was staring at the dome on the farthest side of the room. It was intact, and through it he could see Lore’s head, also intact.

“Bee?”

He tore his eyes away from the dome and forced himself to look at Han. But his mind was still churning. How could Lore’s head be intact? He had seen it dissolve!

“Are you okay?”

He nodded automatically.

“Huh. Your girlfriend was in here earlier. Seems you didn’t tell her about _him_ , and she thought he was you. Got a bit… distraught.” Han smirked.

B-4 frowned. Kayla had been here? Was she still here? He turned to go look for her, but Han said, “She’s gone, left to get ahead of the storm. I wonder if she made it, that thing was moving damn fast.”

B-4 felt his insides clench with worry. Turning back to Han, he saw the old man pick up a scalpel and slice open a small mailbox. Cartridges fell out.

B-4’s eyes tracked the scalpel. Its blade was elongated and wicked-looking. The handle was wound with coated wires, and something black seemed to have gathered between them, like old dried blood.

“This is not what you think it is.” Han said. “It’s just an heirloom. Been in my family for centuries —as a mail opener. That’s all it does: open mail.” He set it down and picked up the cartridges. They looked old, too.

Han sucked his teeth as he turned them over in his hands. “What do you figure? The dealer says they’ll carry ten petabytes. They were standard for about a hundred years, but that was a hundred years ago. _You’ve_ still got a memory port that’ll fit one. It’s redundant, but…” Han’s voice trailed away, thinking.

“Anyway, I guess I’ll find out when I get home.” He set them aside on the field desk and leaned back against it, making it creak rather dangerously. “I wanted to ask you something. I took a quick look at your scans —nothing in-depth yet— but I found a pretty big file in your installation queue: nine petabytes. Do you have any idea what it might be?”

B-4 gave him a flat stare. The old man was toying with him: He knew what it was.

“Funny thing,” Han continued, “There’s a program interacting with it. And it's not a scanning program. It seems to be… extrapolating from it.” He picked up the scalpel and twirled it in his fingers. “Like I said, it was only a quick look. I just wondered if you know what the file —and the program— are. It’d save me the trouble of… digging deeper.” The scalpel flashed in his fingers.

B-4 said nothing.

“No? Okay, that was all I wanted to ask you. I think I hear Mrs Adams in the kitchen. I’m gonna go see if I can grab a bite.”

Feeling a little dizzy, B-4 preceded Han out of the mausoleum.

“Goodnight, Bee,” Han said with a careless wave, leaving him in the foyer.

B-4 hesitated, then tiptoed to the kitchen spoke to eavesdrop.

“Heyyo,” he heard Mrs Adams say in a tired voice. “Tea?”

“Thank you kindly,” Han replied. There was a chinking of ceramic and the sound of hot water being poured, then the scrape of chairs on concrete.

After a few moments Han said, “May I ask a… _gossipy_ question?”

“Go on.” Mrs Adams replied, sounding intrigued.

“Why did Data give Bee to Mr Crusher, and not to Commander La Forge? I thought the Commander was his closest friend.”

“Oh,” Mrs Adams sounded a little disappointed. “Well, he didn’t want Bee to, uh, grow up in the Starfleet environment. He thought the Land Grant would be safer. Wes was willing to relocate here. But the Commander… he’s still in love with the stars.” B-4 could hear the dreamy smile in her voice.

“Safer, huh? Only the deadly weather, violent townsfolk, stampeding buffalo, the murderous horse—”

“The boss didn’t want anyone in Starfleet to think they had a right to… appropriate Bee, like they tried to do to him, and Lal, and Lore.”

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB   
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

B-4 stopped listening, staring at the familiar pink box. 9 PB. The memory cartridges Han had received would hold 10 PB, and he had a port for them. Could he transfer the file? He had to try.

_N_ , he thought, tiptoeing back to the mausoleum. He nicked one of the cartridges and hurried to his bedroom, locking the door behind him.

The storm howled around him, only a thin layer of transparent aluminum between him and the dust billowing over the forcefield, landing on the dome with the force of a waterfall. He hoped Kayla had made it back to town in time. He scanned the room quickly for any signs of a cat, but it was not there.

He slid onto the chesterfield, studying the cartridge in his hand. It was so small, no larger than his thumb. And yet it could hold the whole of his brother’s parasitic backup file: A whole life, forty-one years of it, saved in a mere nine petabytes. It seemed so much larger in his head.

He felt for the redundant memory port on the back of his neck, and plugged the cartridge in. It appeared as an empty box in his vision. He opened his installation queue and moved “Data Memory Backup” to the empty box. A status bar appeared, informing him the transfer would take an hour. He felt a wave of relief as the bar began very slowly to move, and the deadly file was sucked out of his head and into the cartridge.


	19. Chapter 19

He was standing on a stone balcony set in the wall of a mine-shaft. The shaft was used to ventilate the mine’s living quarters, and the walls between the balconies were covered with a beautifully landscaped garden of air scrubbers. A breeze blew down from the ventilation fan at the top of the shaft; and a kelp-like forest of lights floated up from the bottom, providing artificial sunlight.

The garden looked serene. But he noticed a rustling in the plants, and the occasional gleam of a shell. They reminded him of the oversized cockroaches on Earth, though they seemed to vary considerably from generation to generation.

“How many are there?” He asked softly.

“More than a hundred thousand by now,” Han replied. “Though I’ve yet to see them reproduce. And I don't know why they want to: they’re being worked to death here. Now the mine owner is planning a cull, and I don’t know what to do.”

He studied Han more closely. The human looked haggard, like he was walking through a nightmare, and could not wake up.

“Do you know what happened to the first one? The one that was stolen and brought here?”

Han shook his head, and they were silent for a while, watching the denizens of the garden, cradling glasses of synthohol over the abyss. Han kept giving him reluctant side-long glances, and his pulse hitched with each glance.

“Thanks for getting that warrant withdrawn, by the way. It’s nice to be using my real name again. Though I’m wondering why you just… did it.”

He gave Han a puzzled look.

“I thought you were gonna hold it over me till I gave up my stake in the colony,” Han explained with a wry smile.

“Then you think very poorly of me.” He replied, offended. “I know you did not kill that colonist.”

“Look, do you really think they’re going to exchange six hundred klicks of dead planet for ten _on Earth_?” Han asked. “D’you really think they’d cut a deal like that with you? You’re just a _thing_ to them, regardless of what any judge says.” Han seemed to realize his voice was echoing in the shaft, and subsided.

“Omnichron Theta is now part of a strategically important trade route.” He replied calmly. “The Federation plans to build a city and a shipyard where the colony once stood. But after the widespread condemnation they received for forcibly moving colonies along the renegotiated Cardassian border, and the public complaint made by Dorvan V, they cannot simply retract the land grant, they must broker a deal with the titular landholders.”

“Yeah, I read about Dorvan V.” Han gave him another reluctant side-eye. “So how many colonists are left? I mean, we don’t even live there.”

“There are three of us, and the Federation is anxious to close a deal.”

“Only three of us! And this other colonist just handed their stake to you, huh? Who is it?”

“Yes.” He ignored Han’s second question. His mother had asked to remain anonymous.

Han snorted, disbelieving.

“I did not only ask for ten klicks on Earth.” He corrected. “I also asked the Federation to set up a protected reservation, here on Corinthia III, five hundred and ninety klicks, surface and substratum. The mine owner has surrendered the mine to the Federation in exchange for my dropping the charges I had filed against him regarding his treatment of the Exocomp population. The charges were numerous and egregious, thanks to the information you had provided in your letters. My legal team was comprised of twenty renown advocates, and was growing.”

Han was now openly staring at him, jaw hanging. “When did all this happen?”

“The mine was surrendered two hours ago.” He slid a PADD across the stone railing. “I also asked the Federation to offer you the position of Reservation Liason. _This_ is what I am offering you in exchange for your stake in the colony. It cannot be done without your agreement.”

Han touched the PADD gingerly, as if afraid it might evaporate, and began skimming through the legalese. “I can’t believe the Federation let you drive such a hard bargain,” he finally muttered. “What did Starfleet have to say about all this?”

“A great deal, it seems. My negotiations with the Federation somehow became part of Starfleet scuttlebutt, following a rumor that Starfleet Command had rejected yet another request from Captain Picard to promote me to Commander.” He pursed his lips against a now familiar flare of humiliation. “The consensus is that I intend to leave Starfleet and retire to Earth. I received a hundred and six offers of assistance from fellow officers. I accepted all of them.”

“Do you?” Han looked up from the PADD. “Intend to retire?”

“I am… considering it. Please take your time to read over the documentation before responding to my offer.”

“You said the Federation is anxious to close the deal.”

“Yes. Please take your time.” He hesitated. “I also hope you will finish that thought you keep stopping yourself from having.”

Han’s pulse raced again. He swallowed his synthohol in a single burning gulp, and stepped very close. “Be careful what you wish for,” he growled.

He felt a thrill of triumph and a crackle of lust. He had correctly interpreted the side-long glances Han had been giving him. Before his emotion chip, he would not have even noticed. He raised a finger to his uniform collar, and pointedly dragged it down. The cloth parted, and Han’s breath caught.

The human raised his hands and ran them down the newly exposed chest. They were cool against his bioplast. He shrugged off the uniform top and allowed Han to explore him with calloused fingers, and then with chapped lips and soft tongue.

He slipped his fingers between the folds of Han’s tunic, and was surprised to feel the cool metal line of an old-fashioned zipper. He followed it up to the tab, and pulled it slowly down, brushing the tunic open with his other hand. Han’s chest was delightfully furry.

Feeling the human's breath quickening against his bioplast, he gently pulled away from Han, and thumbed open his uniform trousers. Han’s breath caught again.

He let the trousers fall, and took himself in hand, stroking slowly. The human stared at him with undisguised lust.

He reached out his other hand and unzipped Han’s trousers. They didn’t drop, however, and Han was wearing smalls underneath.  
  
Feeling Han should deal with his own sartorial inconveniences, he stepped out of his own trousers, and over to the bedside table.

He retrieved Han’s bottle of personal lubricant from a drawer as the human struggled and cursed behind him, and thumbed it open, toeing off his boots before returning to the panting, finally naked man.

He squeezed a dollop of the lube on Han’s cock and smoothed it over the silky skin, studying the shape and heft of it, toying with the gloriously wild thatch at the base, and the equally hairy balls. Han seemed to melt into his touch. When he applied another layer of lube, the human thrust helplessly into his hand.

“Take me,” he said softly, and Han drew in a long, shaky breath.

He settled himself on all fours on the bed, and Han knelt behind him. He felt the human’s hands fondling his arse. They were warm now. The calloused fingers slipped into his cleft.

“Do you need me to, uh, I mean,” Han shifted on his knees, possibly looking for the lube.

He rolled his arse pointedly against the human’s cock. Han got the message and guided himself inside.

Pleasure radiated like a sunburst from where Han’s cock pressed against the supersensate bioplast that lined that particular orifice. Han pulled back and thrust in, deeper and deeper, rocking himself inside, each slip and slide causing a burst of pleasure that made him want more and more and faster and harder.

 _Do you ever wonder why your father made this?_ A woman’s warm voice murmured in the back of his mind. _I mean, it’s just a cavity, made for sex, with no other purpose. It’s kind of… Oedipal._ Her middle finger had moved slickly in and out of him, her voice gravelly, sated. _And you can control people with pleasure just like you can with pain._

He had been grateful for her observation when, years later, The Borg Queen did try to control him with pleasure. He was even more grateful the Queen had not uncovered the highly specific areas in which he could already feel pleasure, if only as a type of pressure. It seemed coarse when compared to the delicate sensations she had shown him; but he still lusted after the press of a soft human body around his cock, or the crush of a fleshy human cock thrusting into him.

A break in Han’s rhythm interrupted his thoughts. The human’s breathing had become stertorous, his thrusts slowing and his cock softening. He glanced behind himself to see Han’s face was slack and his eyes distant.

He slid up on the bed and pivoted until he was facing Han.

Han blinked and went rigid with shock, noticing his partner had moved. “Sorry, I was, that was, uh…”

“It was a flashback.” He said gently, having recognized the signs.

“Yeah,” Han rasped, sweat beading on his skin.

He slid off the bed and poured the human another glass of synthohol. “Sip slowly,” he advised, adding, “I am not my brother.”

Han flushed. “I know, I’m sorry,” he whispered.

He could not fault the human for thinking of another, when he had been doing the same. He stroked the furry chest soothingly, and Han kissed him.

Images and sensations became entangled then, like the too-slick sheets on the bed. He was careful to face Han as they fucked, so the human could be sure of which brother he was with. The bursts of pleasure at the base of his hips coalesced into a continuous burn that promptly went supernova.

 _That’s an orgasm_ , he thought, when the electric storm through his neural pathways had abated. The spike of jealously that accompanied the realization finally separated him from his brother, and B-4 looked down upon the two of them, tangled in the sheets, Han reaching over to light a candle on the bedside table.

His brother lay on his back, staring straight up at B-4. And B-4 realized that, once again, he could not move.

“Guess it’s true,” Han sighed, “what they say about Starfleet officers on shore leave.”

“I apologize if I was abrupt.” B-4’s brother replied with a rueful smile. “It has been a while for me.”

“Same here.” Han whispered. The candle flame flickered in a draft from the balcony.

“Han, why is there a mirror on your ceiling?”

Han shrugged. “Previous occupant.”

B-4 saw his brother's hand drift absently under the sheets.

“You serious?” The human gaped.

“Would you like me to stop?” B-4’s brother asked uncertainly.

“Yes.” Han replied, but then his own hand slid under the sheets and took over the idle stroking.

“Must be nice,” Han murmured. “Never running out of stamina, never growing old.”

B-4’s brother ran his fingers down Han’s furry arm. “Androids have our drawbacks, too.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“I have found that I am easily infected, infested and corrupted.” His lips pursed bitterly.

“You mean like… by computer viruses?”

“Yes, and rare molecules, carrier waves, inter-dimensional parasites, a homing beacon, ancient deities, and every passing ghost looking for a new home.” B-4 could see the pleasure building in his brother’s yellow eyes, and feel the echo of it in his own cock as Han continued his stroking.

“It is very easy to be overrun,” B-4’s brother murmured, “reduced to a single precarious thought in the back of your own mind, like the flame of that candle.”

As B-4 glanced at the flickering candle on the bedside table, a draft blew it out.


	20. Chapter 20

B-4 woke with the smell of smoke in his nostrils, his cock tingling with the imagined pressure of a hand. He glanced down to find his trousers bulging. He quickly reversed it, his head feeling overheated, like he’d been pulled through a tesseract.

A voice beside him made him jump. “So inconvenient, morning wood, and it’s not even morning. Were you dreaming, Bee?”

Han had rolled the desk chair over to the chesterfield and was reclining comfortably in it, rolling a marble-light and a cartridge around and around in one hand, causing the light to flicker across his face. B-4 stared dazedly for a moment before recalling the stolen cartridge. He ran his fingers along the back of his neck, and was not surprised to find it gone.

“Sorry I can’t let you have this.” Han said mildly, indicating the cartridge he was holding. “I need it.”

Then he gave B-4 the kind of look that made him him feel like Han was peeling away his bioplast and spreading out his insides. “You know, when Data first discovered his dream program, it was after an accident.”

B-4 stared at him, not understanding. Was Han changing the subject? His skin crawled when Han said his brother’s name. It was quiet outside, the storm having blown over. Red light rimmed the horizon, but the sky above them was already a deep indigo, and the name seemed to get sucked into the darkness.

“It was probably like the accident that damaged your hand.” Han continued conversationally. “He thought Uncle Noonien had created the program, and left it for him to activate. But I read through some of Uncle Noonien’s handwritten notes, and you know, he hadn’t actually created the dream program itself. Dreams are a coping mechanism that positronic neural nets develop to prevent cascade failures when they encounter a problem they can’t solve, such as the dangerous plasma surge Data had experienced. Uncle Noonien wrote a subroutine that guided and shaped the program as it developed, and he added one of his infamous little chatbots.”

Han flashed him a smile, but B-4 did not understand. He noticed that the hand made of needles had balanced itself on Han’s collar. It was probably what Han had used to unlock his bedroom door.

“If you’re developing a dream program, Bee, I’d like to take a look,” Han continued, and B-4 tensed. He did not want Han to look in his brain again. “But, not tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Han levered himself to his feet, and stepped to the door with a careless “Goodnight.” He closed it behind him, leaving B-4 alone in the quiet dark.

B-4 blinked at the blackening dome above him. He accessed his dictionary and looked up _dream_. “n. a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep.” He did not understand. What he was experiencing were not thoughts —not what he understood to be thoughts: they were memories, recordings. Some of them were strangely twisted and disfigured, but they still contained a recognizable memory. A box popped into his vision.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

He felt as if every fan and processor in his system had stopped in shock. How could the file still be there? He had removed it: transferred it to the cartridge Han had just carried away. The transfer had been nearly complete when his sleep program had overtaken him.

 _N_ , he thought, closing the box so he could check his installation queue. The file was still there. It had not been removed.

He heard Wes’ voice. “Han? Why were you in Bee’s room?”

“Ah, he was showing me Data’s orchid collection.”

“Was he.” Wes did not sound like he believed him.

“Mhm, the ghost orchid is particularly fine—delicate. Were you looking for me?”

“No, I was looking for Bee. Goodnight, Han.” Wes entered his room a moment later with a cursory knock. He flicked on the light, and closed the door behind him. “Are you okay?” He asked softly.

B-4 nodded, hoping Wes would leave. But instead his guardian sat himself in the chair Han had just vacated, his eyes scanning B-4 head to foot. He handed B-4 his wind-scoured mug, full of nutrient fluid. B-4 sat up to sip from it, keeping his eyes on the floor.

“I, um, I got a subwave message from Geordi today. He had asked the new Romulan Praetor for information about you. But apparently, the records had been destroyed. Han thinks you spent some time in a mine on Remus. He says your scars are mining scars. He also said the part of your positronic brain that had shattered was a memory center. Since it’s healing, I was wondering if any memories had surfaced from before Data found you.”

B-4 shuddered, but continued to stare at the floor. The memories came unbidden into his head: dilithium explosions, gas explosions, coffin-like dens lined like nests with asbestos, rickety machines and duck-footed Exocomps, quiet Reman slaves and chatty Romulan guards. B-4 had buried a good ally in his den, caving it in as was the custom. He had been killed by a guard despite having cut out his own tongue. B-4 had not understood why.

He found he had opened his mouth to speak, and tried to cover the motion with a sip from his mug. If he admitted to the memories, Wes would continue to question him. _"That’s how they get you,"_ the dead Reman signed.

His guardian watched him for a few moments. “Well, it was a long shot, but I thought I’d ask.” He said finally. “Han hasn’t found anything wrong with your vocal mechanisms or the language and articulation areas of your brain. But he’s still looking. We’ll figure this out.” He sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than B-4. “You have hay in your hair,” he added with a smile, removing a piece. “Goodnight, Bee.”

Wes rose reluctantly and left the room.

B-4 drained his mug, willing the memories back into the dark den where he placed them as they surfaced. He went to return the mug to the kitchen, but stopped at the end of his spoke, and turned toward the mausoleum instead. The door was slightly ajar, and he could hear voices.

“—love to ask questions.” Mrs Adams was saying. “But he got quieter, bit by bit. He didn't go from twenty questions to zero in one night like Wes thinks. Dr Crusher said he got quiet when he was confined to quarters on the _Enterprise_ , too. She thinks it could be a cyclical thing.” There was a pause. “Tell me something: could you delete it?”

“Delete what?” Han asked, sounding startled.

“Data’s file.”

“No. I can’t do that.” Han said quietly.

“Why not?”

“It… It’s all that’s left —It’s _not_ just all that’s left of Data. It’s all that’s left of more than four hundred other people, as well. I have to preserve it.”

“Why? They’re all dead, Han. Bee is alive and that file is killing him.”

“Why do you think that?” Han sounded only mildly curious.

“When Wes was fixing Bee’s eyes, his visual input was projected onto a screen in the study, so Wes could fine-tune Bee’s focusing. I saw the installation request pop up, and Bee declined it. That file is huge, Han! And if it’s just been sitting its fat ass in the installation queue for months, what’s piling up behind it?”

“That’s not how—”

“He just seems to be unraveling, Han. It’s gotta be that file.” She was sounding more agitated.

“So you’re asking me to delete all of Data’s memories, the _only thing_ that’s left of him. I thought you were his friend. Or was he just ‘the boss’ to you?”

“Don’t be an asshole. Data is dead, and Bee is only seven months old!”

“Or sixteen if you go by his behavior; or _forty-nine_ years old, actually. He’s older than Data, and made up of even older parts. I’m surprised he’s in such good condition. From what Data had said, I was expecting a wind-up doll with a key sticking out the back.”

“He’s not a doll, Han, he’s a person!”

“Please don’t shout. He’s just a prototype —a cheap trial version of a masterpiece. Isn’t that what you’ve all been saying?”

“ _Just_ a prototype?! Han, you’ve made prototypes! Half your tools are prototypes, made by hand! They’re like works of art! You can’t say Bee is any less important than any of his brothers. I mean, with how fast they got assembled, you could say Lore and Data were cheap copies of Bee.”

There was a pause.

“Yeah, he even left stuff out, old Uncle Noonien.” Han said mildly. “You know Data couldn’t feel pain? Probably a good thing, in the end… Though I never found out how he died.” Han added. “The newsfeeds just said it was in battle at Bassen Rift. Do you know what happened?”

Mrs Adams sighed. “It’s classified.”

B-4 clenched his fists, recalling again how his brother had died. The mug cracked, and he jumped at the sound, retreating quickly down the spoke and making his way to the kitchen.

He stopped dead in the kitchen, staring at Mrs Adams’ knife block. The carving knife was in its slot. He was certain he had left it under Wes’ bed. Like Lore’s head, it contradicted what he had experienced the night before. He wished he could ask Wes about this. But if he mentioned the knife, he would have to admit what he had intended to do with it.

He dropped the cracked mug into the recycler, and stepped down the spoke to the washroom, to remove the hay from his hair. He slid open the drawer that contained Mrs Adams’ hair things, and pulled out a brush.

Mrs Adams had set two mirrors in the bathroom wall, presumably to help her do her hair. When B-4 stood between them, his reflection alternated between the front and the back of his head. He brushed through his hair, and carefully removed the bits of hay from the brush before replacing it in the drawer. When he looked back up, the reflections of the back of his head had turned, and were watching him. They all had his brother’s yellow eyes.

Without waiting to see what his brother would do, B-4 tore through the washroom spoke to the foyer, and collided with Wes, knocking him into the kissing chair.

“Bee, what’s wrong?” Wes asked, gripping him by the arm. B-4 turned to stare back down the spoke. There seemed to be a green glow at the end of it.

“Bee? What happened? Did you see a spider?”

The green glow seemed to be moving up the spoke.

“Bee! Talk to me!” Wes said, using his Starfleet voice. B-4 opened his mouth. But the walls around them took on a greenish tinge, and he tore his arm from Wes’ grasp, running down the spoke to his room as fast as he could. He slammed and locked the door behind himself.

That didn’t stop his brother, however. The glass of the dome took on a green glow, the light coalescing slowly like water dripping down a web. B-4 hurried to the desk and riffled through the drawers, looking for anything he could use to defend himself. But the only sharp object there were the pruning sheers.

“Why are you so afraid?” the ghost asked, his image coalescing in the glass panes. “If my memory engrams are successfully integrated into your positronic matrix, you will become more than you are.”

B-4 remembered his brother saying this as he transferred the file to his installation queue. He had not understood it at the time, and he did not believe it now. He crouched, trying to fit himself beneath the desk.

“You should talk to Wes,” his brother continued, stepping from the glass into the room. “He can explain it to you.” He stepped closer, and B-4 raised the pruning sheers. “He can help you become…” His brother reached out a hand, “talk to him. Talk to Han.”

B-4 did the only thing he could think of to do. It hurt, much more than he had expected. But he felt a wave of relief when it was done. They could all stop now.

The split door crashed open and fell off its hinges. Wes stumbled into the room, collapsing on his knees beside B-4, who did not look up from the red fluid dripping onto the concrete. It looked so much more like human blood now than it did when he was drinking it.

Wes gently removed the pruning sheers from his hand, and B-4 let him. 

Another figure crouched beside him, and he felt his brain grind to a halt. The ghost was still there, yellow eyes inches from his own. “You cannot avoid it,” the ghost whispered, and the world went black.


	21. Chapter 21

“Where were you yesterday?” Joy said by way of greeting. “We thought you be moonstruck!”

“Thanks, Joy,” Kayla replied, mildly offended that her friends thought her capable of going on a moonshine bender. She picked at the replicated noodles on her tray. “I went to see Bee.”

“Yeah? How is your little bee?” Kevin smirked.

“In pieces. He’s been taken apart. They’re gonna delete him, if they haven’t already.” She sucked in her lips to keep them from trembling.

“That’s awful!” Joy whispered. Kevin and Marty said nothing.

“I’m gonna try to get him out of there, but I need help. What do you say?” Kayla tried to keep her face looking determined, and not desperate.

“He’s a robot, ain't he?” Marty said slowly, “and that Starfleet guy owns him?”

“He’s a person, and he’s in trouble.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

“They’re just gonna wipe his memory, right?” Marty said. “We do that when we transfer robots, and it don’t hurt ‘em any. His owner has a right to do it. If we bust him out, we’re stealing.”

“You afraid he’ll forget you?” Kevin teased.

Kayla clenched her fists in her lap, fighting to keep her cool. “They ain’t just wipin’ his memory: they have him in pieces,” she said again.

Kevin shrugged. “Could be standard maintenance. Not our business.”

“How could you be so cold? Y'all met him!”

“He’s a robot.” Marty repeated. Joy said nothing, not meeting her eyes.

Without another word, Kayla stood and left the cafeteria, and then the factory. She knew she wouldn’t be missed. Folks went AWOL all the time in these parts. They were easily replaced.

*****

When B-4 opened his eyes, it was morning. Rivulets of dew were wending their way down the dome. He was sprawled awkwardly on the chesterfield, and Wes was seated beside him, wrapping leather around a circular frame. The leather had the greasy polymer look of replicated material. The frame contained a web that reminded him uncomfortably of Wes’ tesseract. It held beads trapped in it like flies.

“Good morning,” Wes said quietly, tying off the frame and beginning to bead the strips of leather that hung off it. “How are you feeling?”

B-4 did not respond. He was reviewing his memory of the past twenty-four hours. Ten of those hours were missing.

“Your positronic circuitry overloaded, causing other systems to shut down. Han thinks a program took over too much of your central processing. He’s looking into it.”

B-4 did not understand. He had shut down? He opened his mouth, and noticed that it felt grimy. He rubbed a finger against his tongue, and it came away covered in red flakes. He stared at it, slowly moving his tongue around his mouth.

“Han reattached it —your tongue.” Wes continued in that same reserved voice. “I had, um, stepped on it. Sorry. But it was still… okay.” Wes shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Han said what you did was done a lot by miners on Remus.”

B-4 did not respond, and Wes sighed, rummaging through a bowl of beads on his lap. “This is a dreamcatcher,” he announced, holding up the web. “People on Dorvan V believe that if you hang this over your bed, it will catch your nightmares, like a net, and let your good dreams pass through.”

B-4 did not understand. He sat up on the chesterfield, feeling dizzy.

“I asked Han not to come in here again. He said he’d like to see you in the mausoleum, whenever you’re ready. Would you like me to accompany you?”

B-4 thought about this. It seemed Han had not brought up the stolen cartridge to Wes. B-4 suspected Han would if he asked Wes to chaperone. He reluctantly shook his head, tried to stand, and landed back on the chesterfield with a thunk.

Wes stood and held out his hands to help B-4 to his feet, following him out of his room and across the foyer, where B-4 stopped, unable to bring himself to continue to the washroom. Guessing his intentions, Wes murmured, “there’s a sink in the kitchen, too.”

With a nod, B-4 turned to the kitchen instead, and rinsed out his mouth.

Han was at the table, finishing his breakfast. “How are you feeling, Bee?” he asked cheerfully. When B-4 ignored him, he added, “can we have a chat?” He waved at a chair on the other side of the table. B-4 sank reluctantly into it.

Han took a long swig of coffee, and asked, “are you having nightmares, Bee?”

B-4 blinked at him, surprised to find he knew what a nightmare was. He knew because his brother had known, and had thought about it in the memory B-4 had experienced of Han and his brother.

“I did a little digging into your sleep process,” Han continued, “looks like it’s not scheduled: it just kicks in when your memory centers need to defrag, which should be about the same time every day, _except_ one of your memory centers is cracked and can set off the sleep process at any hour of the day. Not very safe.” He took another gulp of coffee. “Also, the process is exactly forty-five minutes long, with no option to stall or interrupt, and no warning beforehand. Must be a bitch.” He smirked, but B-4 continued to stare at him, wondering why Han was telling him things he already knew.

Han pulled a small Petri dish from his pocket. “I wrote a little subroutine that’ll warn you before each sleep cycle: give you time to find somewhere safe to put your head down. It’ll also give you the option to interrupt a defrag anywhere above thirty-five percent —for a little while, anyway. So you’ll be able to wake yourself up from a nightmare.”

B-4 squinted at the tiny cartridge in the Petri dish. It looked like it would fit a port under one of his fingernails.

“If you could bring yourself to trust me, I think it would help you.” Han pushed the Petri dish closer to B-4. “Just think about it, okay? That’s all I wanted to talk to you about today.”

*****

As he did most mornings, B-4 made his way to the stable to muck out the stalls, lay down fresh bedding, and replenish the feed and water. He couldn’t help feeling resentful toward Wes and Han: they were drawing this out, toying with him, giving his brother time to torment him. He was almost impatient for them to put him out of his misery. He was not going to play along this time and allow Han to torture him with another cartridge. Romulan guards could convince miners to drink poisons, to slice themselves open, to swallow microbombs... Bee hosed himself off, cleaned the tools, and returned them to the empty stall in which they were stored. Then he stopped, staring at a pickaxe leaning against a wall. He scuffed the hard, bare earth with his shoes, and wandered back outside, eyeballing the distance between the stable and the stockade.

He had previously dismissed digging as a means of escape: the ground was too hard, and the stockade was earthed in a narrow conduit two feet deep. Any hole he dug would be discovered before he could finish it —except maybe if he started it in that particular stall. He estimated it would take him three days, at least, to dig his way from the stall to the other side of the stockade. He did not truly believe he would make it out in time, but digging was better than just waiting to die.


	22. Chapter 22

B-4 returned to the bunker as the sun was setting, having carefully hosed himself off and stabled the livestock. While he wanted very much to keep digging through the night, he was certain any light in the stable would shine through the chinks in the ancient wood, and he would be discovered. As he made for the spoke to his bedroom, he heard voices coming from Wes’ room, and crept down that spoke instead to eavesdrop.

“—apparently a popular survival tactic in the dilithium mines on Remus,” Wes was saying, “The Romulan guards are known to be sadistic and manipulative; but unresponsive miners can’t be as easily manipulated. Han thinks that some resurfacing memories may have led Bee to fall back on it.”

“Mmm, I dunno,” La Forge replied, “he seems to be reaching. This could just be an excuse he’s providing for not having found anything physically wrong with Bee. And Bee can’t contradict him.” The Commander’s voice sounded tinny, like it was emanating from a PADD. “He’s basically telling us that Bee is just sulking.”

“The phrase he used was ‘fear to engage.’” Wes sighed, sounding tired. “I admit I _have_ seen some teenage behaviors from Bee recently. But this isn’t just teenage sulking. There’s something else going on.”

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , B-4 thought impatiently. The box seemed to be popping up more often.

“Well, the _Titan_ is finally heading back to Earth,” La Forge said, “and if we aren’t stopped along the way, I could be there in a couple days. Would you like me to swing by and have a chat with this Han?”

“That would be awesome!” Wes sounded relieved, but B-4’s skin crawled. He did not want the Commander to come and poke around inside him again. He tiptoed back to his own room. The two halves of his bedroom door leaned uselessly against the wall. Wes had broken the hinges beyond repair the night before.

B-4 scanned the room carefully, looking for orange fur or green light, but there was none. Stepping over to the chesterfield, he found that Wes had stuck a hook onto a pane of transparent aluminum, and had hung the dreamcatcher from it. He settled himself on the chesterfield, and waited apprehensively for his sleep program to kick in.

After a while, he remembered the Petri dish Han had given him. He pulled it out of a pocket and set it on a nearby flower stand.

The darkness around him seemed to grow heavier and heavier, pressing in on him like water.

_A cold wind blew, and the water shattered into leaves, whipping across his face as he stood on the orchard path. One of them cut his cheek, and he felt a drop red fluid roll down his face and drip off his chin._

_The sun had not yet risen. The leaves on the apple trees were black, rattling, fluttering and cawing. His brother was here, he could feel it. But where?_

_The sky lightened a little, and he realized the trees had no leaves on them at all. They were covered in ravens. He stood frozen on the path, and the ravens watched him, fluffing their feathers and flapping their wings. He knew the moment he moved they would chase him, and they were much faster than he was._

_But he had to move: his brother was here somewhere, possibly behind him._

_Another drop of red fluid fell from his chin, striking the path with an audible plink. The ravens had settled, every one of them glaring at him with one beady black eye._

_B-4 turned on his heel and took off running as fast as he could. The ravens flapped and cawed above and behind him, taking off as he passed them._

_The orchard path twisted and wound in ways it had never done before, and for a few alarming moments —which seemed to stretch horribly— he felt lost. He decided to ignore the path and break through the trees instead._

_A knee-high mist flowed between the trees, and B-4 stumbled over roots that stuck out unexpectedly. The mist had a greenish cast to it._

_Just when he felt that he would never escape the orchard, B-4 broke through the last row of trees and onto the open prairie._

_He set off toward the bunker, running faster and faster. In the back of his mind, he wondered why he was running in that direction, and not toward the town. He knew it was a mistake. He was running the wrong way!_

_But it was too late to turn around. The ravens had massed behind him. They were following him so closely, he could feel their beaks inches from the back of his neck._

_He ran and ran, but there was no sign of the bunker or the grassland. For a while it seemed he was not even moving forward, the ravens beginning to glide more serenely behind him, keeping pace._

_B-4 growled deep in his throat and ran even faster, impossibly fast! Finally, without having passed the grassland at all, he saw the bunker in front of him. The gate was wide open, and so was the front door._

_He ran through the gate, and felt it shut behind him. He knew it had locked him in permanently, and he would never leave again. But he did not stop. He ran through the front door, and heard it slam behind him, the lock clicking loudly in the foyer._

_He skittered to a stop, nearly colliding with the far wall of the foyer. He wondered where the ravens would get in. He knew they would get in, it was only a question of where._

_The front door had changed. It was Wes’ old bedroom door, with the large oval window in the middle. B-4 could see the ravens massing outside, churning like a dust devil, circling more and more closely until they all collided, and he knew: they were his brother._

_As he watched, his brother took shape from the wings, becoming more solid as he stepped toward the door and reached for the handle._

_B-4 did not wait for his brother to open the door. Turning, he ran down the spoke to his room, and locked the door._

_He knew it would not keep his brother out. He could hear the click of his brother’s footsteps down the spoke, getting closer. There was nowhere in the room to hide. He backed into the room until his calves knocked against the chesterfield, and he dropped onto it with a thump. Beside him, the dreamcatcher began to glow green._

_B-4 saw the latch lift on the door, and it creaked open. He had to stop this! How could he stop this?_

He looked around wildly and saw the Petri dish Han had given him. He reached for it with shaking fingers and fumbled it open, nearly dropping the cartridge twice as he tried to insert it blindly under a fingernail, watching the dark space where his door should be.

Finally, he heard it click into place. A long block of text scrolled across his vision, too quickly for him to read. Whatever the program was, it had bypassed his installation queue and installed itself.

B-4 looked up, and nearly swallowed his own tongue. His brother stood not two feet away from him, staring down at him with cold yellow eyes. He felt his gears grind with shock. Beside him, the dreamcatcher caught fire, burning green.

Trying to move away from both his brother and the dreamcatcher, B-4 stumbled backward off the chesterfield. His head hit the concrete with a crack.

He tried to get his limbs in order so he could take off running, but they would not obey him. He felt like a puppet with tangled strings, his limbs flapping uselessly against the icy concrete as his brother watched impassively.

Too terrified to stop, B-4 flailed until he found a way to move himself across the floor. He moved by inches, sliding himself across the concrete as if he was swimming on ice.

His brother cocked his head to one side and followed him, his toes only a step away from B-4’s. He seemed to radiate polite curiosity as to what B-4 thought he was doing.

As B-4 slid himself awkwardly back down the spoke to the foyer, the gloom became tinged with green, and his brother began to glow faintly, poisonously.

When B-4 reached the foyer, he had a choice of whether to turn into Wes’ spoke, or into Han’s. He again made the wrong choice, and turned down the spoke to the mausoleum. A voice in the back of his mind screamed at him to stop and go the other way, but his brother was already blocking that way.

His brother seemed content to watch him flail himself into another dead end. The glow around him was growing stronger. Motes of green dust were floating away from him and back down the spoke. He was beginning to blur at the edges. B-4 had an odd suspicion that his brother was being sucked up by the dreamcatcher, particle by radioactive particle.

The mausoleum door was closed, but light was streaming out from under it. B-4 flapped his arm against it, trying to open it, but he could not get his hand to grip the doorknob. Instead, it made soft thumping noises against the wood.

A lock clicked and the door slid open. “Bee?”

Han leaned into his field of vision, grabbed him by the armpits, and dragged him to the middle of the mausoleum. Then he stepped away, and B-4 heard the lock click again.

In B-4’s field of vision, Lal was nailed to her mortuary slab with pins. The slab was spinning slowly, like the drum of a music box. She had been sliced open, her insides pinned to the bare slab around her, the way B-4 had seen the parts of early computers displayed in a museum. Red fluid dripped from her eyes and mouth, and she was singing with a mechanical drone.

_You cannot see_   
_How much I long to be free_   
_Turning around on this music box_   
_That’s wound by a key_

He felt Han’s calloused hand on his chin, turning his face to look at him. B-4 dragged his eyes away from his niece and met Han’s cold ones. “Bee, are you hallucinating?”

 _Yeeeeeearning_ , Lal droned.

Han had knelt in front of the slab containing Lore. The dome was gone. And as B-4 watched, the pieces on the slab began to move. Lore’s head turned to look at Han. His face was livid with hate and fury. Then an arm reached down and thunked Han on the back. The old man puffed as if the breath had been knocked out of him.

_Yeeeeeearning_

B-4 saw a bright spot of red as Lore lifted his hand again. He was holding Han’s scalpel. The wicked blade was covered in human blood. B-4 could not move. He watched as Han pivoted and blocked the next blow. But instead of moving away from Lore, Han grabbed the arm and began to wrestle with it.

_While… I’m… turning around and around…_

Han was not trying to retrieve the scalpel, which stabbed him in the shoulder and chest, aiming for his neck. Instead, he was trying to jab Lore’s head with a screwdriver.

Lore’s arm seemed to be only partially attached to his torso, but it was still deadly as it flailed with the scalpel. He seemed to be trying to both kill Han and keep the old man away from his head, which was also moving, turning madly with a _thunk thunk thunk_.

Then Lore’s head fell off the slab, bouncing with a sickening crunch on the concrete. Han dodged the arm and dived for the head, barely avoiding the snapping mouth. He jabbed his screwdriver into the back of it and twisted. Lore’s mouth stopped snapping and his arm dropped, hanging off the slab. The scalpel fell from his fingers with a clatter.

Han was still for several moments, panting and listening. Lal lay silent and dead on her slab, her dome back in place. And no one outside the mausoleum seemed to have heard anything.

Finally Han struggled to his feet and set Lore’s head back on its slab. It still grimaced furiously. Then he knelt and began running his fingers over B-4’s head and shoulders, making his skin crawl. But he could not move.

“Oh!” Han gasped, and he picked up the screwdriver again. It was dripping with red fluid.

“Trust me.” He whispered. “I can fix this.”

 


	23. Chapter 23

B-4 felt the stab of the screwdriver; then a wrenching, tearing pain as Han yanked a chunk out of his neck; and then a wonderful feeling of fluidity. He could move again!

He scrambled away from Han, who was holding something that looked like a cross between a door hinge and a plug. It was a blunt, ugly device, not his creator’s delicate design. A strip of torn bioplast clung to it, and the wires hanging from it were coated in red fluid.

“I’m so sorry, Bee, I didn’t know you had this!” Han whispered. “It wasn’t installed by Uncle Noonien. But I should have known, I should have seen it on the scan. I’m sorry.”

B-4 felt the hole in his neck, just below his collar, where the plug had been installed. He was so used to it, he hadn’t thought about what it was for. His brother had used it to partially re-activate B-4 shortly before he had died. He still remembered the fear and confusion he had felt being at his brother’s mercy.

He flinched at Han’s touch on his arm. “Lemme patch myself up, and then I’ll patch you up, okay?”

Han stood shakily and removed his tunic. Even though the ambient tuner was on at full blast, the air in the mosoleum was frigid, and every hair on the human’s furry skin seemed to stand on end. He flipped open a travel first-aid kit and removed a strong-smelling wipe and a small tube of sealant.

Beside the first-aid kit, the Exocomp lay tilted to one side, completely reassembled, but still dead. It looked like a cross between a clam, a clove of garlic, and a cockroach: very different to the blocky, duck-footed ones B-4 had known.

He startled when Han knelt beside him. “Would you mind?” Han asked, turning his back so B-4 could seal a stab wound half-way down. “Thanks,” he said, pushing himself back up and rummaging hurriedly for a fresh tunic. His breath misted in the air.

A moment later he hunkered down beside Bee again, tool roll in hand. “Will you let me cover that for you?”

B-4 nodded, and Han set his little spider to work measuring and cutting out a patch of bioplast.

“You know, I was just a boy when Uncle Noonien built you.” The old man murmured as he reached into the hole and soldered the leaking tubes. “Him and Juliana. He’d let us kids come in sometimes and ask you questions, to see how you’d respond. You always asked questions back.”

B-4 stared at him, mouth agape.

“When you, uh, didn’t work out, they deactivated you, like your two older brothers. But Uncle Noonien kept tinkering and tinkering with you. He had run out of credit, so he couldn’t build a new android from scratch.”

B-4’s eyes slid to Lore’s slab.

“Yeah,” Han said, noticing his look. He slapped on the patch and lit up a bioplast welder: no fancy stitching this time. “He got you to work just well enough to sell you off. Juliana was so furious with him, we thought she’d gone crazy. We had to physically separate them for a while.” He finished welding and picked up the bioplast activator. “He used the new credit to build Lore, and I guess Data, too.”

B-4’s mouth twisted, and his hands clenched in his lap. Han did not appear to notice. He finished activating the new bioplast, and B-4 reached up to feel the patchwork. It was seamless, with no scars like the ones B-4’s brother had deliberately left on him.

Han set down his tools and leaned back against the field desk with a wince, making it screech along the concrete. His eyes drifted to the arm dangling off the slab. “Lore was the first one of his droids I’d ever really… got to know.” He said. “I honestly thought he was a sex-bot. That used to be a thing, you know, a human male fantasy. And Lore sure knew how to seduce people. He certainly seduced me.”

B-4’s head swiveled to Han so fast his neck clicked, and Han raised an eyebrow at him.

 _I am not my brother_ , the shadows whispered. B-4 waited for Han to continue.

“I, uh… I was more into astronomy than robotics in those days.” Han said after a moment, his eyes drifting up to the mural above Lore’s slab. “And one day, while we were in my quarters, I spotted a Crystal Entity through my telescope. I think it was just passing through. It was emitting these graviton pulses. And I thought, what if it’s sentient, and that was a mating call? We tried to contact it, but all we had to work with were subspace waves… Then Lore killed a colonist, and he framed me for it… I never found out why he killed the guy.” He looked back at B-4. “I managed to escape. But I never saw my family again.” He pushed himself to his feet with a groan. “And that’s your bedtime story, Bee.” He said with finality, helping B-4 to his feet.

B-4 opened his mouth.

“Yes?” Han asked, noticing this.

B-4 had so many questions, for a moment his mouth just hung open. But then he closed it with a click. He would not be Han’s confessional, carrying his secrets to the grave when the old man finally deleted him.

*****

B-4 spent the rest of the night feeling his way through the sheds as quietly as he could, looking for a light small enough to help him dig at night without being discovered. Unlike Wes, he did not mind the spiders. As he searched, he thought about Han’s Exocomp. It could dig much faster than he could. He decided he would restart it and ask it for help. Finally, he found a flashlight with a hand-crank in the truck’s toolbox.

When Mrs Adams went to milk the cows, he followed her into the stables, released Mustang, and mucked out the stalls as usual. But when he had finished, he got back to digging. When it grew too dark in the hole to see, he cranked on the flashlight and held it between his teeth. Just before last-breath, he hosed himself off and brought in the livestock, not wanting Mrs Adams to spend any more time in the stables than necessary. Then he continued digging.

Several hours later, he was startled by a pink box that was not his brother’s backup file. It was instead a warning tucked into the corner of his vision:

Sleep cycle  
begins in:  
**15:00**  
minutes

He was about to dismiss it, when the clock began to count down. He left it up as he climbed out of the hole, wiped himself down as quickly as he could, and crept back to the bunker, making it to his room without seeing anyone. His head had barely struck the leather of the chesterfield when the clock zeroed out.

_Wind soughed through the branches. B-4 opened his eyes to find himself again on the orchard path. He glanced fearfully at the trees, but they were covered in leaves, not birds. The leaves were just beginning to turn green as light seeped over the horizon._

_“Brother,” a voice called in the distance._

_Feeling weary of this game, B-4 took off in the opposite direction. But again the paths twisted in unfamiliar ways._

_“Brother,” the voice called again, closer._

_The path began to curve at upward angles, causing him to strike his feet on pavement where he had expected air. A sharp turn at a steep angle knocked his foot out from under him, and he fell sprawling._

_“Brother,” the voice said, close behind him. He covered his face and curled into a ball, not wanting to see the burned hand reach for his off switch again._

_But instead he felt cool bioplast on his cheek._

_“Look at me, brother.”_

_B-4 tightened his hands on his face, and his brother sighed. “Do you remember that evening you watched pre-Eugenic travel documentaries with Wes?”_

_It was such a strange question that B-4 lowered his hands to look at his brother. He looked like he had before he died, and there was no green glow around him._

_“Most humans do not like stepping into the unknown. They prefer to know some things in advance about where they are going. When I was found, I had the personal messages and journals of four hundred and eleven colonists in my memory banks. The humans who found me thought the colonists had done it so they would not be forgotten. But our mother said they did it so I would know some things about where I was going.”_

_B-4 did not understand._

_“Specifically,” his brother continued, “so I would know some things about the humans with whom I was going to live. The information did not stop me from being frequently baffled by them. But it helped me to understand, a little, and to want to learn more.”_

_A large red button appeared on the path beside B-4. It said_ **EXIT** _in bold white letters._

_“Let me finish?” His brother said quietly. B-4 set his hand on the button, and waited._

_“I learned slowly by experience. And you,” he paused, looking pensive. “I did not perceive that you were learning at all. I was wrong, and I am sorry.” He paused again, as if choosing his words with care. “I wanted to give you an advantage: to start with more than what you had —which was nothing. I wanted you to know everything that I had learned by experience, so you would know things about where you are going. Do you understand?”_

_B-4 shook his head. It sounded like a Romulan trick to him. He pressed the button._

_“Brother, do not forget me.” His brother smiled sadly, then he and the orchard disintegrated._

B-4 opened his eyes. A pink box appeared in the corner of his vision:

Sleep cycle  
resumes in:  
**15:00**  
minutes

B-4 watched the countdown apprehensively, worried the dream would be waiting for him when the sleep cycle restarted. But he slept dreamlessly, and woke to find his room bathed in moonlight.


	24. Chapter 24

B-4 crept down the passage to the mausoleum. The door was open, and the windows glowed with moonlight.

Han had curled himself into a shivering ball on the field cot, his long coat spread over the blankets. His breath misted the air, and the ambient tuner hummed on its highest heat setting. It stood much closer to the cot than was safe.

The Exocomp still lay dead on the field desk. B-4 doubted his plan would work, but he had to try.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought, picking up the Exocomp. He studied it for a while, turning it over and over in his hands, running his fingers down the divots, pressing until the casing opened.

The Exocomp opened in wedges, like the wings of a beetle. B-4 teased the smallest wedge out from the depths of the machine. It was the little brain-case. He quietly unrolled Han’s tool roll, and pulled out a tachyon particle emitter.

A hand locked his wrist in a white-knuckled grip. Caught off-guard, B-4 jerked his arm away as hard as he could. He felt the weight of a human body follow the motion, and heard the crack of a skull against concrete.

“Please! Don’t hurt her!” Han gasped. “I know you’re angry, Lore! You can take it out on me. But please, not her!” His free hand was shaking as he reached for the particle emitter. There were tears in his eyes; but whether from fear or injury, B-4 could not tell.

He twisted his wrist free and backed away, the Exocomp in one hand and the particle emitter in the other. Han gasped again as he stepped into a beam of moonlight from the narrow window.

“Bee! No, please!” He hissed.

B-4 knelt on the cold concrete. He pointed with the emitter, and the human stumbled in his haste to obey, kneeling on the floor a few feet in front of him. Han’s breath came in rapid white puffs, and his eyes flicked nervously between B-4, the Exocomp and the particle emitter.

At its highest setting, the emitter could fry the Exocomp’s delicate brain. It shouldn’t matter at this point, as the Exocomp was dead. But Han was clearly worried for it.

B-4 couldn’t help but enjoy this unexpected power over the old man they had brought here to kill him. For the first time, he truly understood what had compelled the Romulan guards to commit their creative atrocities.

He set the Exocomp on the concrete between them, and placed the tip of the particle emitter against the brain-case.

“Please!” Han hissed again. B-4 took pity on him, and shifted his grip so the human could see the emitter was on its lowest setting. He turned it on, and the wedge glowed a sickly orange.

After a tense minute, the wedge split open. Inside was another wedge. A hinge and two wires linked each chitinous brown lid to the inner wedge. While the hinge was intact, the wires were disconnected. At the top of the inner wedge was a small spike.

B-4 reached around the machine and grasped one of the old man’s hands. He pressed the index finger onto the spike. Han winced, but did not move till B-4 had released his hand.

The second set of lids opened, revealing another wedge. Again the lids were attached with a hinge flanked by disconnected wires. But instead of a spike on top, there was a metal disc. B-4 pointed, and Han pressed his pricked finger to the disc.

After a moment, the third set of lids cracked open, revealing the most complicated little brain B-4 had ever seen. It was shaped rather like a bismuth crystal, and it glowed with infinitesimal lines of light. Han stared at it in awe, not even breathing.

B-4 stood and fetched the smallest pair of tweezers he could find in Han’s tool roll. He handed them to the old man, who promptly re-connected the four wires leading to the pretty little brain.

The old man reverentially closed the smallest set of lids, and connected the next four wires. Then he closed the middle lid and connected the last four wires.

When Han had closed final layer of the brain-case, they sat back to see what would happen next. For several minutes, nothing did.

“She disconnected those wires herself, didn’t she?” Han said softly. “Is this what they’ve done, when they shut down for good and we can’t start them up again?”

B-4 nodded, and Han sighed. His teeth were chattering with cold.

“The miners on Corinthia III used to just... throw them in the forge furnace when they stopped working like this.”

B-4 nodded again. The miners on Remus did the same thing.

Finally the Exocomp moved, retracting its wedges smoothly into its clamshell shape. It stood up on a pair of legs as graceful as a songbird’s, and angled its clamshell mouth up at B-4.

“Oh, Athena!” Han breathed. It hopped around to look at him. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get there in time.”

The Exocomp hopped onto Han’s lap and began climbing up to his shoulder. The old man stopped it half-way with a fierce hug, not letting go until it wriggled in protest. It perched on his shoulder like a very large parrot, or a second head.

It pointed its mouth at B-4 again and cocked its body sideways, looking even more like an alien head.

“Data?” it asked in a tinny, feminine voice.

“No, not Data,” Han corrected. “His brother.”

The Exocomp gave an alarmed whistle, and Han laid a soothing hand on its shell.

“Not that brother, another one. His name is B-4. I... I don’t know how to thank you, Bee.”

B-4 stood and pressed his palms to his forehead, his fingers overlapping. The gesture was common on Remus, though guards tended to beat a mine-slave for daring. B-4 lowered his hands, turned on his heel, and left.

“Mercy.” He heard the Exocomp say behind him. “Why is he asking for mercy?”


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the font is too curly to read, you can use the “Hide Creator’s Style” button at the top of the page to remove it.

Dear Kayla,  
  
   I hope this letter finds you. There are so many things I have wanted to tell you. But I was  
afraid. It had always been safer not to speak.  
   I want to tell you about my life. I do not know why, except soon this letter will be all that  
is left of it.  
   My earliest memories are of being a scholar’s toy. I think I had been someone else before  
then, but he had been deleted.  
   The scholar used me to entertain himself and his visitors. And when I was not wanted,  
I was made to sit in a hall with his collection of artifacts, and deactivated for long periods  
of time.  
   I have heard that humans can be rendered unconscious by a blow to the head. Being  
deactivated is like that. I pleaded with the scholar’s servants the first few times they did it.  
I begged, and tried to find a way to be useful. But they knew how to hurt me, and they  
taught me that begging never helps.  
   One day, I woke on a planet called Romulus. The scholar had sold me to the Romulans,  
because they wanted me to replace someone. But the opportunity had passed, and they  
were at war. So they sent me to a dilithium mine on their neighboring planet of Remus.   
   It was like the human version of hell. But I was able to forge alliances with Remans who  
hid me from the guards and taught me how to survive.  
   I lived there for a long time. I am not sure how long. My internal clock kept resetting  
to **0** when I slept.  
   Eventually the guards caught me, and I was taken to a room full of Romulans, Remans,  
and even a human. They opened my head, and they broke me. I begged them to stop, but  
this made them laugh, and it was a long time before they stopped.  
   When they had finished, I could not remember who I was. The human checked to make  
sure, and then he deactivated me.  
   I woke in a desert, staring at myself. Then I woke in a room full of lights, again staring  
at myself. But he said he was my brother. He was with a friend, and they were trying to  
fix me.   
   I was so happy, Kayla! I had a brother, and he was fixing me. I was safe. I was loved.   
   Then my brother deactivated me without a word of warning. When he woke me again,  
he said that I was dangerous, and he would be deactivating me indefinitely. I wish I knew  
what I had done to make him so angry.  
   A short time later, the humans woke me to inform me that my brother had died. I was   
locked in his rooms, and I learned from his friend that my brother had not really loved me.   
He had wanted to use me as a backup unit. He had tried to download and install a copy of  
himself into my brain. The download had succeeded, but the file had not installed. His  
friend did not know why.  
   The installation was and is still pending because I am stopping it. I have been stopping  
it for months now. But it is breaking my mind again.  
   I am considered an object by the Federation, not a person. So my brother had quickly  
taken ownership of me. He had even added me to his will. When they read his will and  
distributed his possessions, I was sent to Wesley Crusher.   
   Wes asked me a lot of questions, and then he opened my head. I thought he was going  
to hurt me like the Romulans had, and I was afraid. But he fixed me instead. I could  
think better, and I began to remember.  
   Wes called himself my guardian, not my owner. He said he wanted us to be a family.  
I wanted so badly to believe him. My brother could not love me, but maybe Wes could,  
if I was good, and if I could show him I am not dangerous.  
   But I knew this was a fantasy. The Swoose was my only real chance to survive. I was so  
happy you wanted to fix her with me. I had hoped you would escape with me. You made  
me feel like a real person. I wish we had more time.  
   But Wes grew tired of waiting for the installation. My brother had been his teacher and  
his friend. So he tried to rescue him. And he failed because of me.   
   I cannot remember it very well, but what I did not only stopped him, it hurt him, and it  
alerted his people about what he was doing. Wes was a Traveler, but they have rules about  
interfering with the past, so they excommunicated him. He lost his people, and he lost his  
arm. I am so sorry.  
   Wes has brought a robotics engineer from my creator’s family to complete the installation.  
I am locked in, and I cannot get out.  
   I hope you can forgive me for my silences. It had always been safer not to speak. And I  
did not want to scare you away.  
   Please finish fixing the The Swoose, and “get the hell out of dodge.” My creator’s writing  
is worth a lot. Sell it, and make a better life, better friends, a family.   
   I love you. Please do not forget me.

*****

  
B-4 had signed the letter with a drawing of a mechanical bee. It had become smudged by Kayla’s thumb.

She lived in The Swoose now, spending every waking moment working on it. As soon as she could get it off the ground, she would fly it to the Land Grant and demand to see him. She knew they had deleted him by now: they had already taken him apart the last time she saw him. The memory was like a knife twisting in her gut. But she had to make sure.

And when she had made sure, she would destroy the bunker, everyone in it, and that monster that had used Bee as a backup unit.


	26. Chapter 26

B-4 was on his knees in the tunnel, picking apart the hard, dry earth and stone as quickly as he could. The debris was piling up past his waist. Soon he would need to stop and clear the pile from the hole. And then he could finally begin to dig upwards! He could hear the humming of the stockade wall above him. He was almost out!

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

 _N_ , he thought, lifting his pickaxe again.

The sound of a human voice made him freeze.

“Bee, is that you down there?”

B-4’s eyes widened in shock. It was Commander La Forge! He must have come looking when B-4 was not at the gate to greet him, and had heard the digging in the stable.

“Whoever you are down there, come on out! I am armed and I will fire!” The Commander said.

For a moment, B-4 could not move. Then he spat out the flashlight and slowly backed toward the tunnel entrance, climbing out into the stable. He stood and faced the Commander, clutching his pickaxe hard enough to make the wood creak.

“Bee! What are you doing?” The Commander looked stunned. He was holding a tricorder in his hand as if it was a weapon. To B-4, it was. He raised the pickaxe threateningly, and La Forge took a step back.

B-4 knew his only chance to escape now was to immobilize the Commander, to finish his tunnel as quickly as possible and start running. He glanced at a nozzle on top of the tricorder. It could emit an ionic pulse strong enough to to test an atmosphere, but too weak to harm most life-forms. It could stun B-4 for several minutes, however.

If he could throw his pickaxe at the Commander and suffer those few minutes of paralysis, he knew he would be able to finish his tunnel and escape. But a pickaxe thrown at this range would likely kill the Commander.

B-4 hesitated. It seemed the Commander could see what he was thinking. He raised a hand placatingly.

But B-4 could not bring himself to throw the pickaxe. So he dropped it and turned to run. He hadn’t gone two steps when an ionic pulse struck him in the back.

It felt like the stockade had fallen on him. He lost control of his limbs, and his momentum slammed him hard into the ground. After a moment, he felt La Forge remove the survival rope from his pocket and bind his wrists tightly together. B-4 could break through most ropes, but not this stuff.

He couldn’t stop the tears that turned his vision a noxious shade of orange. He had been so close! But now he was done for. La Forge would take him to Han, and the old man would do what he’d been brought here to do.

He heard the beeping of the tricorder, and then Wes’ voice. “Geordi? Are you in here?” Wes’ footsteps ground to a halt. “Bee! What happened?”

“I’m afraid he’s gone off the rails again. I had to stun him. Go look in that empty stall.”

Wes obeyed, and La Forge turned back to B-4. “Get up, Bee. You can move now.”

B-4 stood up, pressing his teeth firmly together against the words now rushing to escape. Begging never helped. He furtively wiped the tears away, and waited for the Commander’s next order, his eyes on the tricorder.

“Let’s get you to the mausoleum. I heard the robotics engineer is set up there. Though what he’s been doing with his time here, I have no idea.”

Wes caught up with them when they reached the front door of the bunker. He stared at B-4 as if he didn’t recognize him. B-4 felt betrayed, and then he wondered why. Had he really, deep down, hoped Wes would show him mercy in the end? There was no chance of that now. He tried twisting his wrists against the rope, but it was far too tight. They reached the mausoleum.

Han’s eyes took in B-4’s dusty, shirtless appearance and bound hands. On the field desk, Athena gave a nervous whistle.

“Lie down on the table there.” La Forge said, and B-4 felt his every sensor stand on end. His joints locked, and he could not move. The empty slab in front of him seemed to vibrate.

Wes took him gently by the shoulders. “Come on, Bee,” he murmured, guiding him to the slab, “lie down now. That’s it.”

B-4 clenched his teeth and kept his eyes on Han as he obeyed, hoping for some reassurance. But the old man would not meet his eyes.

Once B-4 was on the slab, Han dug his fingers hard just where his leg met his buttock, and he was suddenly unable to move his leg. On instinct, he aimed a kick with his other leg at Han’s head. But the old man ducked, caught the leg and disabled it as well.

“Han!” Wes sounded shocked.

“Didn’t fancy getting kicked in the head.” Han said mildly, setting B-4’s leg back on the table.

“Could one of you please deactivate him?” The Commander said, uncoiling a thick fiber optic wire from the equipment in Han’s trunk. With a surge of panic, B-4 pulled against the rope as hard as he could.

“No, we’re not doing that.” Wes said firmly, setting his hands on Bee’s arms to stop him from struggling.

The Commander frowned, looking over the tools neatly aligned on the field desk. “Well, Dr Soong, what’s wrong with him?” He selected the declamper. “You’ve had a week to study him. What are your findings?”

“Well, some Reman or Romulan bastard damaged the left lateral lobe of his brain.” Han said mildly. “But it’s healing. And he has an incompatible file caught between two sets of installation permissions. But I believe there’s a work-around in progress. Apart from that, he’s fine.”

La Forge stepped back to the slab. “He’s _fine_? He’s been behaving oddly for weeks. He’s unable to vocalize. He's self-mutilating. And I just found him digging a massive hole in the stable for no reason.” Though his voice was level, La Forge sounded angry. He reached for B-4’s head, and B-4 flinched, bringing his bound hands to his head in the same bid for mercy he had made to Han the night before.

“He’s digging toward the stockade, I bet.” Han replied in that same mild voice. “It's natural for a prisoner to try and escape, especially before an execution.”

B-4 dropped his arms in shock. There it was, the confirmation he’d been waiting for. No more mind games, skirting around it, or pretending to be fixing him. To his shame, he found himself speaking. Worse, he found himself lying, and begging.


	27. Chapter 27

“It will not bring him back! Commander, Wes, please!” B-4 twisted against the rope, feeling his bioplast tear, fluid dripping onto his chest. “Deleting me will not bring him back!” He could hear in his own voice that he did not believe it.

Wes and the Commander gaped at him in shock, as if he were a stranger, and he stopped himself, ashamed. Begging never helped. He felt Wes’ hands on his arms again.

La Forge recovered first. “Bring who back?”

B-4 clenched his teeth to keep from responding, and pulled again at the rope. More fluid dripped in dark red splotches on his chest, and Wes’ hands moved to grip his forearms.

“His brother.” Han said. “That pending file installation I mentioned is caught between Data’s permission to install, and B-4’s denial of that permission. I gather it’s the file you both were looking for: It’s been sitting in Bee’s installation queue for several months now. His brain has been coping by creating a dream program around it, like an oyster making a pearl.”

As if summoned by his brother’s name, the pink box appeared in B-4’s vision again.

 _N_ , he thought viciously.

“He has an installation queue?” La Forge asked, sounding confused. “I haven’t seen it.”

“Well, most modern programs would bypass such an old stopgap.” Han shrugged. “But not a chunk of ROM. The new dream program has been interfacing with it. It’s really quite remarkable. But the rogue interaction is making it dangerous for Bee to keep denying the installation. There are signs the dream program is trying to circumvent the denial.”

There was another pause. B-4 realized they were all watching him squirm.

“But _why_ is he denying it?” La Forge asked. “It's just a package of read-only memory engrams, and he has the space. This just isn’t making any _sense_!”

“That’s not what Bee thinks it is.” Han replied. “And anyway, accepting the installation could cause a cascade failure. His brain just wouldn't know what to do with all the Data.” His lips quirked for a moment, then dropped. “You uploaded this database with no parsing guidelines—”

“He already _has_ parsing guidelines!” La Forge interrupted, indignant.

“Did you review them? They’re for fluid kinesthetic learning, not structural assimilation like his brother’s parsing system.”

The Commander was silent.

“And that’s the problem I’ve been working on: how to integrate a large information database with a brain designed to learn by doing.”

B-4 did not understand most of what Han was saying, and he did not care. It sounded like he had been right, and his brother’s file had been trying to possess him, despite his denying the installation. He tugged harder at the rope, and felt a flare of pain as Wes gripped his wrists.

Han watched him, impassive. “I was going to propose removing the file altogether, but the dream program has anchored it, linking it to other systems in ways I haven’t fully deciphered. I can’t just yank it out.”

“That’s not right,” Wes said slowly. “He doesn’t just learn by doing.” He held up his clockwork hand, now streaked with red fluid. “He made this by studying a previous model: that’s visual learning and requires structural assimilation.” Han’s eyebrows shot up. “And you said he’s a prisoner. But he can walk right out the gate any time. He does it every day.”

“No, he can’t. It’s human access only. Athena tested it an hour ago.” Han waved a hand at the Exocomp on the field desk, who chirruped in agreement.

Wes stared at B-4 for a moment, frowning, then he gasped. “The stockade reset! It must've erased your ID. Oh, Bee, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t you say something?”

B-4’s mouth dropped open. He did not understand: He had just said something, and he was still tied up on his brother’s mortuary slab, waiting to die! He tried again. “I cannot be who you want me to be. I cannot. Please, Wes, do not delete me! I know I am not much, and I do not aspire to be more. But I do not want to die!”

“I’m not going to delete you!” Wes’ hand clenched again around B-4’s wrist, red fluid seeping between his fingers, “I would never do that to you!”

Wes looked horrified, and B-4 wanted very badly to believe him, even if it meant he was falling for a trap they were setting. “Then please make him stop!” He whispered. “I keep trying to stop him, but he is relentless.”

“ _Who_?” Wes asked, looking even more alarmed.

“My brother.” Now that he spoke of him, B-4 felt the ghost could hear him. “I see him when I sleep. And even when I am awake, he will not stop!”

The three humans stared at him: Wes shocked, La Forge confused, and Han… he looked like he was dissecting B-4 in his mind. It made B-4’s skin crawl, and he pulled again at the rope.

La Forge shook his head. “So if he can talk, why hasn’t he said anything before now?” He addressed the question to Han.

The old man blinked at him, his thought process derailed. “ Uh… It could be a survival strategy he picked up on Remus—”

“Yes, I’ve heard that theory.” La Forge interrupted. “But it just _doesn’t add up_. The silence only started a month ago. He _did_ talk at first. And then he just _stopped_.”

“So what happened a month ago?” Han asked, turning to Wes. “What could have convinced Bee that you did _not_ have his best interests at heart? Possibly that you wanted his brother, not him, and you would kill to get Data back?”

B-4 wished Han would stop saying his brother’s name: it seemed to bring the ghost closer. He was just out of sight, waiting.

The blood had drained from Wes’ face as Han spoke. “I—I did try to get him back,” he said quietly. “I can create pinpoint tesseracts; and I had nine seconds to step in and pull him out. It was more than enough time…” He swallowed convulsively. “But I discovered that a thalaron explosion is so powerful, it can shatter time, and make it shift in ways I couldn’t navigate. I got stuck halfway between here and there. It was B-4 who pulled me back, I still don’t know how. He saved my life.”

“Is that what killed Data, a thalaron explosion?” Han asked.

“He killed himself!” B-4 snapped. The memory still angered him. “It is not fair for him to use me as a backup. He could have used Lore!” He jerked again at the rope as hard as he could, and felt his wrists bend oddly. Red fluid pattered on the floor.

Wes grabbed B-4’s hands with his human one, his skin slick with red fluid, and B-4 looked down, surprised Wes would put his fingers where B-4 could so easily crush them.

“Please stop,” Wes murmured, “you’re hurting yourself.”

“But that’s _not_ what happened!” La Forge sounded both confused and angry. B-4 looked at him and flinched. The Commander was holding one of those combination tools humans love, and the short-range laser component was extended.

“It’s ok,” Wes said gently. He took the laser from La Forge and sliced through the survival rope. B-4 felt a wave of relief as his hands were freed. Wes helped him to sit up, and kept a protective hand on his shoulder.

B-4 felt the top of his legs pop as he placed his weight on them, and found he could move them again. The red fluid began to coagulate on his wrists, feeling cold and slimy.

“A _backup_?” The Commander fumed. “Damnit, you thought Data would just take you over like some kind of _parasite_!”

“You said so, on the _Enterprise_. He said so, too! He said he was integrating his memory engrams into my positronic matrix. He even named the file his backup!”

“No, that’s _not_ what he meant at all! He meant—”

“This is a trick, just like the Romulans do!” B-4 interrupted, his skin crawling again with the possibility. “You want me to install the file myself. Guards could convince miners to walk right into mineshafts, and this is—”

“No, Bee, you shouldn’t—” Han started.

“You're not on Remus anymore—” Wes interjected.

“ _Listen_ , Bee,” the Commander snapped, overriding the other two, “Data had an ultimate storage capacity of a hundred petabytes, and fully half of that was his programming. Everything that made Data himself couldn’t _fit_ into nine petabytes. This file you’re so afraid of, it’s just _memories_! He wanted the file to be _your_ backup, Bee, not his. He wanted you to use his memories to help you navigate your life. He didn’t want you to _become_ him. He fought so _hard_ to be seen as a person, Bee. He would never have forced anyone to become a—a _spare body_! Not even Lore!”

B-4 realized his mouth was hanging open, and closed it with an audible click. He had an odd feeling he had heard something similar before, perhaps in a dream. He tried to compare it with what he recalled of the Commander and his brother's words on the _Enterprise_. But his memories of those days were too fragmented. The recordings skipped in his mind like scratched holodiscs. After the Romulans broke him, he had not been able to think properly until Wes had started fixing the cracks.

“Bee,” Wes said quietly. “Did you say your brother is haunting you?”

B-4 looked at him dazedly, not understanding the question.

“He _has_ had nightmares.” Han supplied. “And possibly hallucinations. I think the dream program is developing glitches. But I can fix it.”

“The way you’re fixing Lore?” The retort was out before B-4 could stop it. The thought of Han digging through his brain again made him physically recoil.

Wes’ hand clenched painfully on his shoulder. “ _What_?”

Han’s eyes grew cold again. “I didn’t fix Lore,” he said softly. “I killed him. Slowly, carefully, and thoroughly.”

La Forge looked taken aback. He stepped over to Lore’s dome and peered inside. “...But you reassembled him.”

Han ignored him, his eyes boring into B-4’s. “He obliterated my family, my colony. He turned them to _dust_. I wanted to return the favor: to obliterate him so thoroughly he had no chance of _ever_ coming back. And just to be sure, I replaced him with someone else. The Commander is right: Data wouldn’t do it. But I would, and I did.”

B-4 shuddered. “You turned _him_ into Data.”

“As well as I could, yes. As the Commander said, a set of read-only memory engrams is not enough to make a person. But I think, if you turn that one on, he’ll probably think he’s Data.”

The pink box appeared again in B-4’s vision.

PENDING INSTALLATION  
“Data Memory Backup”  
Space required 9 PB  
Estimated wait time 3 hours  
INSTALL NOW? Y/N

B-4 hesitated.

 _I wanted you to know everything that I had learned_ , his brother's ghost whispered, _so you would know things about where you are going_.

 _Y_ , he thought, and his world disintegrated into a rush of cascading error boxes.


	28. Chapter 28

Mrs Adams was sitting beside him, her head resting on her arms, which had trapped one of his. He could feel her fingers twined with his, and he wondered how long she’d been there, holding his hand.

Han was on his other side, perched on a chair that creaked when he moved. He kept wavering in and out of focus, and he seemed to be tapping on a PADD. He stopped when he noticed B-4 watching him.

“Welcome back.” Han whispered.

“Ammm III ssstill alivvve?” This felt like a dream. He looked around, and noticed Wes curled up on a wooden armchair, his head resting on the dome that covered Lal. The Commander was asleep on the field cot, cradling a mewling basket.

The ambient tuner was trained on the basket, and all the humans were swathed in blankets. But B-4 didn’t feel the cold. He felt… prickly: full of what Mrs Adams called pins and needles.

He tried to remember what had happened. He found he had nineteen hours missing, and before that… “They tttried to kkkill me?” he whispered sluggishly, mostly to himself. Then he shuddered, realizing he was again lying on his brother’s slab.

“No,” Han said, “never. Wes won’t even let anyone deactivate you. And he wouldn’t let me look inside your head unless he was right beside you, watching. He’s very protective of you.”

B-4 did not understand. There was something missing, something so big it had stretched his mind like a rubber sheet. Now he just felt like a saggy rubber sheet.

“Whattt… what is missing?”

“Data’s memory file. I managed to remove it, eventually.” He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “And I added a guidance subroutine to that marvelous dream program of yours,” He smiled, and B-4 frowned at him. Marvelous is not the word he would use to describe it.

Han held up the PADD. “I put the memory engrams in here for you. They’re indexing.”

B-4 tried to wrap his head around the fact that his brother’s larger-than-life memory file was gone. “I tried ttto remove it…”

“Mm, and you could only make a copy. Thank you for that copy.” Han’s voice became cold. “I couldn’t have overwritten Lore without it.”

“That was… evil.” B-4 sighed, and Han winced.

“You know, when I went to cut open his dome, I was surprised to find someone had beat me to it. Was it you?”

B-4 hesitated.

“Did you ask him for help?”

B-4 considered this for a moment. He found it was easier to parse in his mind what had been real, and what had not. He rolled his head slowly on the slab.

“Why not? He would have helped you escape, if only to use you later.”

“He would have kkkilled Wes. He threatened to before. Long time ago. I remembereddd...”

“Those weren’t your memories, though, were they?” Han whispered, and B-4 rolled his head again. “But Bee, _you_ tried to kill Wes, didn’t you, with a carving knife?”

B-4 stared at him, wondering how he knew. “I could not.”

“Why not? You thought he was trying to kill you.”

B-4 blinked, trying to form a coherent explanation. But his thoughts would not coalesce. He settled for, “he is family.”

“Who you thought was trying to kill you.”

“Family.” B-4 whispered firmly.

“Okay.” Han shrugged. “He was right, by the way, you have multiple sets of parsing guidelines. The others were redundant, until they weren’t.” He held up the PADD. “It actually would have been much easier to leave this inside you, but Wes wouldn’t have it. You wanted it out, so he wanted it out.” He rubbed his eyes again. They were bloodshot and rimmed with blue.

B-4 did not understand. “He wanted you to install it.”

“Yeah, ‘cause he didn’t know what _you_ wanted, ‘cause _you_ wouldn’t tell him.” Han sounded annoyed by this.

On B-4’s other side, Mrs Adams sat up slowly, rubbing at her neck with a low moan. If she had heard any of B-4 and Han’s conversation, she made no sign.

“How are you feeling?” She asked B-4, who opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

“No you don’t.” She said, giving his hand a squeeze. “ _Tell me_ how you are feeling.”

“Still scared.” He admitted in a whisper.

“I’m so sorry about the gate,” she murmured. “When you kept disappearing, we thought you were leaving the compound. Where were you?”

He hesitated. “The stable, the garage, the cistttern…”

“The cistern! Wouldn’t you have gotten waterlogged?”

“Commander La Forge gave me… protective casings he had created for my brother. He kkkept opening me on the _Enterprise_ , adding things. He kept talking about my brother.” B-4 shifted uncomfortably.

Mrs Adams gave him a sad smile. “He was in mourning. We humans mourn a long time when we lose a loved one.”

B-4 did not know how to respond, so he returned his thoughts to the missing hours. “What happened?” He asked.

“Cascade failure.” Han replied. “You finally accepted the installation, didn’t you?”

“I do not understand. Cassscade failure is death.”

“Not necessarily. I saw Lore go through a couple of ‘em. I didn’t know how Uncle Noonien fixed him, though.”

“Then how did _you_ fix me?” B-4 asked, still puzzled.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence there, Bee.” Han said dryly. “Data had asked me to look into his daughter’s cascade failure. I thought I had enough figured out to fix her. So he invited me to come and try it out during his next shore leave. But then he died.”

“Have you tried it, now you’re here?” Wes asked softly. They all looked at him.

“No.” Han said apologetically. “No, I…. I didn’t have the heart to disturb her. And I didn’t want her to see what I was doing to her uncle. What I had wanted to try worked on you, though, Bee.” He resettled himself in his chair with another creak. “Your neural net will heal. It really is the most versatile positronic brain I’ve ever seen.”

“So for your next miracle, Han,” Mrs Adams said firmly, “you’re going to fix Data’s daughter, like you promised him.”

“What—really? You’re going to let me near her after all this?”

“You’ve had your revenge.” She said in a quiet, hard voice. “Now you’re going to stay and watch it play out.”

B-4 shuddered.

“You’re going to reactivate that thing?” Wes said incredulously. “But it has no emotion chip. If it still remembers being Lore, it’ll be sociopathic!”

“Actually, Lore’s neural net had an emotion center built in, unlike Data’s.” Han said conversationally. “It was a bit out of whack, but Uncle Noonien knew that, and he’d worked out a solution. I reconfigured it using his notes.” Han leaned back in his chair, and it creaked ominously. “It was really quite simple. I wonder why he hadn’t done it himself. It might’ve stopped Lore from killing him.”

Wes looked dubious.

Han sighed, and turned back to Mrs Adams. “I stand by my work, Lonnie. If we survive reactivating _that thing_ , I’ll fix her.”

“I’m counting on it.” She checked her watch and stood up. “It’s nearly first-breath. I need to feed the kittens and milk the cows.” She dropped a kiss on B-4’s forehead, and he blinked in surprise. “Then we’ll reprogram the gate, ok? It’s good to hear your voice again, Bee. Put a shirt on.” She set a clean shirt on B-4’s chest and left with the mewling basket.

B-4 looked down and realized the dust and red fluid had been cleaned off him, though his trousers were still scuffed from digging. The rope cuts on his wrists had also been resealed.

The Commander took Mrs Adam’s seat beside B-4. “I would like to apologize,” he said quietly. “I should have reviewed your parsing guidelines before downloading such a large file, and not assumed that they would be similar to Data’s.”

B-4 did not know what parsing guidelines were. But he did know that something the Commander had previously said to him was incorrect. “You said my brother did not kill himself. But I saw it, in the tesseract. He died alone.”

In B-4’s peripheral vision, Wes flinched as if he’d been slapped.

“Yes,” the Commander replied, his eyes filling with tears. “He died alone. There was… The Remans had a very, _very_ formidable weapon they wanted to use against Earth. Our ship engaged theirs at Bassen Rift, and we were losing.” La Forge paused, choosing his words with care. “The Admiral decided to teleport to the enemy ship and destroy the weapon. We couldn’t teleport him back, but he went anyway. And Data… he disagreed with the decision. He had a prototype emergency transporter unit —only one. The ships were pretty close together, so he just jumped right out into space and onto the enemy ship. He sent the Admiral back to us before he could object. And then _he_ destroyed the weapon, and himself in the process. Those last few seconds were what you saw. So, in a sense, he wasn’t really alone. You and Wes were there with him.”

B-4 thought about this, as beside him, Han shook his head sadly.

“He said I was dangerous.” B-4 said after a while. “What did I do?”

The Commander frowned. “You don’t know?”

“No,” B-4 whispered.

“The Remans programmed you to access the _Enterprise_ computer and retrieve some information. They didn’t get it, though, we outsmarted them there.” He said with some satisfaction.

“Is that all?” B-4 voice rose indignantly, “he deactivated me for that! He said ‘indefinitely,’as if I was Lore!”

“Oh, Bee,” The Commander sighed. “It wouldn’t have been _indefinitely_. Family meant so much to him, and he was so _happy_ to have found you. He would have found a way to remove the hold the Remans had on you, like I did. ”

“I… cannot believe you.” B-4’s voice faded again as he recalled his last real conversation with his brother.

“Well, maybe someday,” La Forge said with a sad smile. “I hope you believe that Wes and I—” He stopped, listening, and B-4 saw Wes stand tensely. There was a very low hum in the air.

“That sounds Klingon,” Wes said very quietly. The Commander nodded.

B-4 sat up, eyes wide. “Let me out!”

 


	29. Chapter 29

Kayla didn’t so much land as skid to a halt, leaving unfortunate gouges on the new grassland. She had flown _The Swoose_ at the lowest impulse speed, and as close to the ground as she could. But landing her was still a bitch. Kayla had realized as she flew the bird that there was no way she could fly this thing any further off the ground.

When she had finally recovered enough from the landing to stand, there were about thirty lights blinking in alarm on her improvised dash —only four of which she could identify.

It had been easy, if tedious, to extend all the consoles so they were within reach of the captain’s chair, making it possible for one operator to press all the buttons. Learning what all those buttons were for was a whole other ball game.

Kayla punched the button to open the loading ramp, and slung a Klingon disruptor rifle by its strap over her shoulder. She couldn’t find the on switch or the trigger, but it still looked menacing.

She hunkered down near the top of the ramp and peered at the stockade gate, her breath misting in the frigid morning air. There were men gathered around the gate: Mr Crusher, Han, a man she didn’t recognize, and B-4… or his body, at least. Her stomach clenched.

The gate opened, and B-4 stepped outside of it, his open shirt flapping wildly in the morning breeze. He stopped and looked around, as if he was seeing the prairie for the first time. The knot in Kayla’s stomach drew taut.

B-4 began to walk toward her, but Mr Crusher stopped him. B-4 spoke to him, and continued walking. B-4 spoke, and he hadn’t for weeks. That cinched it for Kayla. This was not B-4.

She dithered about what to do next. She could only close the ramp from the bridge. Should she run for the bridge, or bluff?

She doubted she could reach the bridge in time. And anyway, this guy probably knew the same code B-4 had used to get in a month ago. She straightened her shoulders and stepped down the ramp, pointing the disruptor at not-B-4.

Not-B-4 didn’t seem concerned about the weapon. “You did it.” He said with a small smile. “You fixed her.”

She said nothing.

“You found my letter.” He added, pointing at the watch on her wrist.

She repeated herself.

“They did not do it, in the end.”

“Uh-huh.” She said at last. “How’s that?”

He glanced back at the group standing just outside the gate. “They… I…”

Her stomach sank. “I thought you were smarter than Bee.”

“He is—was. Will be.” He looked confused.

Rage burned up her throat, and before she could stop herself, she hurled the disruptor at him. It was all she could do with it. “You bastard! It was _his_ life! It wasn’t yours to take!”

He caught the disruptor and powered it on.

“Shit!”

“He did not… overtake me.” His mouth opened and closed a few times as he worked out an explanation. “My creator made three of us. I mean, he made more, but I think there were only three—now two—of us remaining.” He powered the disruptor back down, and set it on the flattened grass. Then he glanced back at the stockade gate. “Han deleted Lore instead of me. …It was revenge. My brother will wake in Lore’s body. Maybe.”

Kayla hesitated. She wanted to believe him. But, “How do I know you’re not lying?”

He stared at her, looking lost. “I do not understand.”

“Prove to me that you’re B-4, and not your brother.”

“But you did not know him. How can I prove to you I am not him?”

“That’s not what she’s asking.” Mr Crusher said, stepping out of thin air beside them.

“Thefuck!” Kayla jumped.

“Sorry,” Mr Crusher said to her, and then to B-4, “she’s asking you to prove you’re _you_.” He turned back to her. “That bird of prey is sending a distress signal on all hailing frequencies. The transmitter’s barely transmitting, but I still got the hail, and others might, too.” He held up his PADD, showing what Kayla guessed was a Klingon mayday message. “Permission to step aboard and turn this off?”

“O-okay,” Kayla stuttered, and Mr Crusher hurried up the ramp.

“Your player piano,” B-4 said.

She blinked at him, still in shock.

“I think, to be replaced, we must first be deleted, or there would be two of us in one body, fighting for it.” He shuddered. “My brother would not have my memories if I had been deleted.”

“Okaaay.” She said slowly, folding her arms.

“Your player piano has only one song. We danced to it one night. I… I searched for it, using the tune. It is called _Time in a Bottle_.”

“Oh,” she said blankly. She knew what he had just said was not proof of anything, but he sounded so much like B-4 before he stopped talking... She stepped forward dazedly, not knowing what she intended to do, and wound up resting her head on B-4’s chest. “I’m really tired, Bee.”

“I am sorry I scared you,” he whispered, wrapping his arms around her.

“I’m sorry I made the buffaloes stampede,” she sighed. “They looked awesome splashing across the creek, though.”

B-4 said nothing, probably confused by the non-sequitur.

“Bee?” She added after a moment. “The fuck did Mr Crusher just do?”

“He is a Traveller. He…” he shrugged, “Travelled.”

“Oh,” she said again, recalling that B-4 had mentioned this in his letter. She heard the click of heels on the loading ramp, and reluctantly stepped away from B-4.

“Nice setup you’ve got there on the bridge. Can you fly her?”

“No,” she said bluntly, waving a hand at the gouges in the grass.

“Well, that could be caused by a busted Y-circuit.” Mr Crusher said with a shrug. “When the plasma coils blow, they usually take out the Y-circuit. This is the bird that went down north of the orchard, right? Rumor has it that the plasma coils took it down.”

“Y-circuit! That’s what the flux-capacitor-thing’s called! We couldn’t find a spare and I couldn’t figure out how to make one.”

“It’s difficult to land without one.”

“Yyyeah...” She said, eying the gouges again.

“Do you need a pilot?” He asked.

“Um… what?”

“I can fly her. I have about a hundred hours simulation experience helming birds-of-prey.”

“You want to fly her? Can’t you just… Travel anywhere, like you just did?”

“Well, it takes a lot out of you,” Mr Crusher said. “And I’m really not supposed to do it.”

“You would not prefer to stay?” B-4 said. “You have _him_ back.” He sounded resentful.

Wes shook his head. “That’s not Data. He died at Bassen Rift. But he asked me to look after you, and I would like to do that, if you’d let me.”

“You own me.” B-4 pointed out.

“That’s irrelevant. I won’t stop you if you decide to leave without me. I’m just… asking if you’d like my help. I’d love to go with you. I _can_ fly a bird-of-prey. And I know things about the Quadrants that could be useful in staying invisible, like where to find water that’s not in a depot. How _is_ your water supply?”

“Disgusting.” Kayla shuddered. “And the bathrooms in there are _weird_! There are no replicators, either.”

“How are you doing for food?” Mr Crusher asked.

“There’s some stolen stuff in the storage room. —I mean, stolen by the Klingons before they crashed.”

“I have a portable replicator that does the basics pretty well. What do you say? May I join your crew?”

Kayla saw B-4 open his mouth, and cut across him. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

“I can make a few suggestions. More than a few: It’s a big galaxy.”

B-4 opened his mouth again, and she grabbed him by the arm. “Could you give us a minute?”

Mr Crusher nodded and turned back toward the bunker, walking this time. B-4 watched him go, and Kayla remembered something he had written in his letter: _He said he wanted us to be a family. I wanted so badly to believe him. My brother could not love me, but maybe Wes could._

“So, I have a concern.” She said. “My momma always told me never to be alone with two guys, especially if they’re like Marty and Kevin.”

B-4 gave her his _I do not understand_ look. “He is not like Marty and Kevin. He does not look at girls—women—that way.” He corrected himself hastily. “But I have seen him look at some men that way. —Well, no, not really that way.” He corrected himself again.

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“His looks had more… respect.” B-4 clarified.

“Oh. Okay... He got good credit? I went AWOL at work: my credit’s in the tank.”

B-4 shrugged evasively, and Kayla recalled something else he had written in his letter. Being excommunicated probably hit one’s credit worse than going AWOL.

“Well… Put him at the other end of the crew quarters, okay? I don’t want your dad overhearing us.”

B-4 smiled the first real smile she had seen from him in weeks.

“Are you okay to go back in there, to get your stuff? And maybe… ask Mrs Adams if she’s got some real food?” On cue, her stomach growled: the rations she’d been living on were well over fifty years old, and tasted like pasteboard.

B-4 glanced back at the bunker. Kayla followed his line of sight. The vicious horse was grazing near the gate.

“We’re not taking the horse,” she said firmly.

B-4 blinked at her. “Of course not. He would not fit.”

She shrugged. “Tell Mr Crusher not to forget his credit chip, yeah?”


	30. Chapter 30

Han watched as B-4 returned to the gate, trepidation clear in his every step. He couldn’t help admiring how graceful the android was. Uncle Noonien must’ve been in pretty dire straits to sell off such a work of art.

“Well, that wasn’t quite the cinematic reunion I was expecting.” He said when B-4 was in ear-shot. “No kisses or twirling around.”

The boy gave him a dirty look.

“I guess that’s a _no_ on a tour of the ship?”

Athena dug one of her delicate talons into his shoulder. But B-4 ignored him and addressed Crusher. “Come with us.”

A grin a mile wide split Crusher’s face. But he only said, “five minutes to pack?”

B-4 nodded, and they both hurried inside, Crusher making for his room, and B-4 for the kitchen. The boy seemed to have the better idea, so Han followed him. Mr Starfleet went after Crusher.

The kitchen was a whirlwind of noise as Lonnie threw things into an honest-to-goodness antique hamper. “Your girlfriend ruined my lawn.”

“Sorry, Mrs Adams.” B-4 murmured.

“I’m packing you a hamper. Don’t you leave before I’m done!”

Han snuck a cracker from a jar and went back to the mausoleum. He picked up the loaded 10 PB cartridge and PADD, and made his way to B-4’s room.

The boy was pulling a dream-catcher off its hook and tossing it into an arc-welder case he was apparently using as a trunk. Han tossed the PADD and cartridge into the case.

B-4 frowned at them. Han could tell he didn’t want them there. But he didn’t want to touch them either, even to remove them.

“Those are yours.” Han said. “I added installation guidelines and a parsing trigger to the engrams in the cartridge. They’re safe for you to install.” B-4 glared at him. “Look, you don’t have to touch them or even look at them. But please keep them safe.”

B-4 slammed shut the lid of his trunk. “Thank you.” He said, and left without another word.

“You’re welcome.” Han replied to the empty conservatory. He returned to the mausoleum, and tucked his trusty letter opener —okay, scalpel— into his belt. Then he carefully pushed the dome off of Lore’s slab and dragged it out of the way.

Staring down at the face on the slab, Han decided to wait for Mr Starfleet before turning the android on. He made himself comfortable in one of the old armchairs, and waited for the old wreck outside to rattle off.

If he were honest with himself, he was waiting for it to explode. His shoulders were tensing with the expectation. Athena chittered soothingly by his ear.

But the ship launched without a mishap, and his shoulders dropped as Lonnie and Mr Starfleet slowly made their way back to the mausoleum, Lonnie carrying her basket of kittens.

Like Han, Mr Starfleet stared down at the android like he could really just leave it alone. “Lonnie,” he said, “maybe you should—”

“No.” She interrupted, looking him straight in the eye. Spine of steel, that woman.

“Okay, here goes…” Han muttered, reaching under the android’s head. He lifted it up, flicked open a back panel, and twisted a little knob to the “on” setting. The knob had been his idea, after the night Lore had been woken by two random wires crossing, and poked him full of holes.

He closed the panel, set the head back down, and stepped a prudent distance away. Mr Starfleet stayed right by the slab, however, watching intently.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the sharp yellow eyes opened.

*****

In the vacuum of space, light bloomed and swirled a bright neon green, charged particles dancing their reels with a noise like sub-space static. Humans claimed they could feel the static, like pointy bits of metal pricking them all over.

A humanoid shape stepped onto the space. Once upon a time he would have pricked a human all over and asked them to compare the sensation. But these days he could feel it for himself, and he shivered.

“Hullo, old friend,” he said softly. “Sorry I’m late: traffic was hell, kids making a mess in the backseat —speaking of which, one sec.” He leaned back out of view. “Settle down, or you’ll spend the next three hundred years as amoebas!”

He straightened back into the void and stroked his beard distractedly, leaving a wake of miniature green lightening bolts. “What do you think of the new chin-joy? A grandfather should look the part!” His mouth stretched into a wide, proud grin. His white hair and beard fluffed in the static, crackling as he moved. “Anyway, I think I still owe you a favor or two. If I can find you in all this… noise…”

He squinted, his eyes tracking slowly back and forth as clouds of green light swirled in the distance. “Ah, there you are.” He reached out a finger, and touched a particle, which sparked and glowed like a minuscule star. Another particle joined it, drawn to it like a magnet.

As more particles joined the first, the stars began to form constellations, loose connections that extended for light years, speeding recklessly closer to where the proud grandfather stood. As they drew together, the particles began to form loose glowing shapes: squares and spinning discs, long ropey cylinders, waves of what looked like sparkling gauze.

The shapes tightened, atoms forming into molecules, elements into compounds. For a moment the green nebula was reflected in a strip of perfect titanium. Then the reflection bent as the titanium curled into a rod, and disappeared under a neural net, muscle fibers and wires. A humanoid thigh took shape, followed by a knee, a calf and a foot.

The shape spun as more particles joined it, forming a torso, another leg, two arms, a neck, and finally, a head. Long ropes of positrons extended from the head, fanning out into the void like hair in water. A protective coating crystallized around the filaments, reinforcing the illusion of hair. Then the positronic strands spun into braids and coiled slowly into the head.

For a moment the shape segmented, body parts breaking away and drifting before spinning back together with a series of sharp snaps. The sparkling gauze coalesced around the form and congealed into skin. On the head, a face took shape, and strands of actual hair fanned out from the newly formed skull.

The body spun slowly and gracefully in the void, more perfectly formed this time around than he had been to begin with.

When the shape looked solid enough, and only a few particles were rushing late to their places, Q stretched out a finger to touch that of an outflung hand, and a spark jumped between them.

“This is your wake-up call, my professor of the humanities. Class is in session.”

The face turned toward the sound of his voice. A pair of yellow eyes snapped open, and the newly reformed hand grasped his.

  
**The End**


End file.
